A study of a procedure to deodorise emissions from piggeries with

The nuisance of bad odours from piggeries is mainly due to the volatile nature of the products produced by slurry during its storage beneath the animals. The study deals with the treatment of these odours by ozone in fattening buildings.Chemical and olfactometric analyses were performed in order to estimate the effect of ozone on the gases which produce odours and on growth performance. During the test, we compared the effect of ozone (which has oxidising properties) on the odour of used air from a treated room with used air from an identical control pig fattening room.We conclude that there was a small beneficial effect of ozone on offensive odours. Indeed, chemical results showed lower concentrations of H2S, indole and skatole.Although ozone is potentially dangerous, this procedure does not appear to affect the health of humans and pigs, because the ozone concentrations that were measured remained lower than the maximal acceptable limit for worker exposure and we did not observe any effects on pig growth performance or on feed consumption.Better odour removal could be obtained by improving the diffusion of ozone in the building and by increasing the level of ozone used.