It's a typical “wealth from waste” project. The waste is rumen contents of slaughtered animals such as buffaloes, sheep and goat. The wealth is enzymes, which can be useful as dietary supplement for livestock and poultry.

The slaughter waste may produce many pollutant gases in the environment such as carbon dioxide (CO{-2}), Ammonia, Carbon monoxide (CO) hydrocarbons and so on, which are harmful to the environment.

Researchers at the National Research Centre on Meat (NRCM) here feel that slaughter wastes will be helpful in two ways, firstly – reducing the burden on environment and secondly, maximum use of slaughtered animal by-products.

In a project initiated last year, Dr S. Vaithinathan and co-scientists at NRCM are working to extract enzymes from the rumen contents of these three animals, a major waste of slaughter houses in the country.

The rumen contents also cause environmental pollution when proper disposal is not practiced in the nearby areas of slaughter houses. If this is the negative side, then the positives of these enzymes are that they could be used as dietary supplement for livestock and poultry to improve the utilisation of low quality feed, the scientists feel.

Once the project is completed, they will develop methods to extract the enzymes: Amylase, Xylanase, Carboxymethyl Cellulase from the slaughter waste, NRCM, part of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, said.

“In this research we have focused on three meat animals – buffaloes, sheep and goat, which are generally used in the slaughter houses,” said Dr N Kondaiah, Director of NRC Meat. Testing of the product at the laboratory level is progressing well.

At present, these enzymes are produced from aerobic fungus and bacteria for the use in feed industry. The scientists also found that buffaloes have higher quantity of Xylanase while sheep and goats have more Amylase in their rumen contents.

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