Recycling plant at centre of Irish pork scare
December 24, 2008 at 11:25 am
The world of recycling has been hit with some bad and unwanted press after it was revealed that the recent Irish pork scare has been blamed on a recycling plant in County Carlow which produces pig feed from recycled waste.
The problem started when polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) showed up in testing. This product has been banned in Ireland since the 1970s.
Once it had been discovered, the scale of the problem soon became clear, with 47 farms in Ireland and 9 farms in Northern Ireland understood to have been affected. The potential danger to consumers of the pork had much wider implications, with up to 25 countries receiving the meat. However, the risk to health is apparently low, and the general advice is that people should not be worrying too much.
Individuals who do have cause for anxiety are the employees at Millstream Power Recycling, the recycling plant at the centre of it all. The safety breach is a disaster for the plant, as something like this does not simply get brushed under the carpet. There will certainly be a long and detailed analysis which will aim to discover what could possibly have gone wrong.
With food scandals arising with some frequency in the news recently (a notable example is the devastating Chinese tainted-milk scandal which has hit the headlines over the last few months), it is more important than ever that strict rules are kept, in order to prevent potentially dangerous problems from occurring in the first place.
Let’s hope that the exact cause of the Irish pork problem is discovered in order to prevent something similar happening again, as next time it could occur on a far more devastating scale.
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