Meatmeal plant sets poser

Press, 2 April 1979, Page 12

Meatmeal plant sets poser

An application to set up ai plant at 1200 Main North! Road to make meatmeal from poultry feathers and meat scrap has presented the Waimairi Council’s town planning committee with a poser. Mr M. E. Fraemohs has made an application for a conditional use, but the hearings sub-committee yesterday was not sure whether to consider the application a conditional use or a specified departure. Mr Fraemohs made an earlier conditional-use application for his scheme, but the] council rejected it, and said it was really a request for a specified departure, which it declined. However, because of modifications to his meatmeal scheme, the sub-committee is uncertain M’hether the application is still for a specified departure.

Mr Fraemohs said his earlier application had failed as an application for conditional use because too many raw materials would come to the proposed site. He said he had now reduced raw materials to two or three truckloads a day of poultry waste from a killing plant. He planned to use a kiln drying plant, associated with a timber-processing business he owned on the same site, as a fuel substitute. Basing his recommendation to the committee on specified-departure criteria, the county planner, Mr D. D. Hinman, said the application should be declined. It was not a true exception be-

cause there was land more, appropriately zoned for the plant at Belfast. Mr Fraemons said, however, that he had met ail conditionai-use criteria for the Main North Road site, and that his application was for a conditional use. If he took the plant out to Belfast on to Industrial DI land, which was better suited to noxious industry, the business would become uneconomic, he said. On the proposed site, he would need ionly one extra man, and could produce fuel from his ! timber-processing plant. At Belfast he would need to transport both fuel and .raw materials, and would need extra staff.

There were three objections to the scheme: The Kainga Settlers’ Association said it was trying to upgrade the area’s designation, and a noxious industry did not help; Mr R. A. Campbell said that arsenic residues in iwood waste had possibly caused the death of stock on adjacent land he leased, by seeping into stock watersupply. Mr Fraemohs planned to burn arsenicallytreated wood waste as fuel, he said. Mr B. Harris, for March Construction, Ltd, said that the manufacture of animal i by-products was permitted |as of right in Industrial DI 'land at Belfast.