http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9931 Planet Ark UK builds 5th power plant to burn cattle carcasses
UK: February 27, 2001 LONDON - Britain, which began on Sunday the grim process of burning livestock carcasses to try and contain an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease, said yesterday a new power plant was under construction which will burn cattle remains to generate electricity. Government agency the Intervention Board (IB) said the new plant, at Fawley on the South Coast of England, would be the fifth cattle-burning plant under a European Commission-sponsored scheme to deal with BSE, or mad cow disease. A similar plant in Scunthorpe currently produces enough power to light 70,000 homes. "We've commissioned a new plant from (waste disposal company) Shanks, which will be coming online in August," said an IB spokesman. Under the Over 30 Month Scheme (OTMS), which was introduced by the European Commission in 1996 to tackle BSE, all healthy British cows over 30 months old are currently rendered down into a fine meat and bonemeal powder, which is burned in four British power plants. Since 1996, when the scheme started, about 4.9 million cows have been rendered down, generating a mountain of meat and bonemeal that presently stands at 441,000 tonnes, the IB spokesman said. So far, 158,000 tonnes of cattle have been burned under contracts with three companies: Fibrowatt, Prosper de Mulder (PDM) and Shanks. Fibrowatt's 38 megawatt plant at Scunthorpe came on line in May 2000, while PDM's two plants came on line in July and September 2000. The IB spokesman said that by the end of March 2002, about 60 percent of the meat-and-meal mountain would be burned, with the balance burned by March 2004. The cows incinerated are generally dairy cattle at the end of their productive lives. Restrictions over the movement of livestock, because of foot-and-mouth disease, have currently brought the OTMS scheme to a standstill. A spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food said there was currently no possibility of incinerating foot-and-mouth infected livestock to produce electricity. "You have to balance the risk of transporting them in lorries and spreading the infection against doing something on the farm such as burning or burying," she said. "We might look at rendering (turning them into meat and bonemeal) later on, if relevant," she added. The foot-and-mouth outbreak, first discovered almost a week ago, spread through Britain's farms on Monday as vets slaughtered and burned hundreds of pigs and cows in a desperate attempt to contain the highly contagious animal virus. Story by Pete Harrison REUTERS NEWS SERVICE Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
