Current best practice in water usage for medium to large integrated export meat processing plants is 5 - 7 kL water/tonne HSCW. It is challenging to further reduce water usage, and involved considerable trials and costs.

This project seeks to directly involve processors by funding water reduction projects involving novel approaches for reducing water consumption and which are widely applicable across the industry.

The future of the processing sector is contingent on understanding, evaluating and implementing water sustainability programs if current water shortage and discharge regulations are maintained at their current restrictive levels or increase. A review of the effluent streams generated from the boning room was conducted and from this streams that were to be considered cleaner were chosen for further testing.