An Irish company involved in the handling of hazardous waste is to import special equipment it says is capable of disposing of BSE-infected animals using a technique approved by the World Health Organisation.
Cara Environmental Technology, based in Clonskeagh, Co Dublin, is to import from the US a "digestor" to destroy cattle infected with BSE.
The managing director of CET, Mr Brendan Keane, explained that the digestor had been developed there to deal with hazardous materials from laboratories, or with outbreaks of infectious diseases among farm stock.
The process dealt with the problem of disposing of tissue by the use of a sodium/potassium hydroxide solution in a pressure-heated chamber, he said.
The system operated at 150 degrees Celsius and 60 pounds per square inch pressure for a period of three hours to dispose of the body of an animal. "The machine, which we have been researching, can reduce a 500kg animal to 20kg of bone and one tonne of liquid in a three-hour period," he noted.
He said the WHO-approved system destroyed the prion (believed to be the source of infectivity) in the animal's body and that no contaminating materials remained.
"What we are offering to do is to have the remaining bone and liquid from these animals incinerated," Mr Keane said.
The system, which is in wide use in the US, has the advantage that the equipment is mobile and can be moved to the location where an infected animal has been identified.
"Further contamination is avoided because the animal or animals are simply loaded into the container for digestion and can be disposed of on site," he said.
The digestor can be built to any size, but CET is looking at a mobile unit which could take three to four tonnes of carcasses at a time.
"We have been looking at the possibility of offering banks of these digestors to meat plants who could have them on site and they could use them in the slaughter for destruction scheme."
A mobile unit which could be used to process cattle, pigs or poultry would cost about £1 million and it was hoped that one could be up and running here within months.
(More tomorrow)