So you’ve done all your homework and designed a facility that has adequate pressure, plenty of hot water and nary a puddle to be seen. Good for you, but you’re not there yet. We need to get this plant across the finish line and eliminate any potential for cross-contamination. This can be as benign as improper handling of food or as serious as contaminants getting into your domestic water system that could lead to recalls or massive shutdowns as you try to figure out where the problem lies. By focusing on the key areas where most problems occur, you can minimize your exposure to a catastrophic event.
Again, proper planning and design of your plumbing systems can be your best defense in avoiding any issues with cross-contamination in your processing plant. Here are the areas to focus your attention on:
• Provide indirect connections for the waste from any plumbing fixture that is used to prepare, process or store food. Make sure the air gap is a minimum of 1 inch, two pipe diameters or as required by code. This also applies to the condensate lines from the evaporators in your cold storage rooms.
• Provide boot washers, foamers and handwash stations at all entrances to the processing areas. Consider automatic systems that do not allow entry until proper sanitizing has taken place.
• Ensure that any equipment that is connected to the domestic water system has the proper backflow protection (BFP). The American Society of Sanitary Engineering has written standards specifying what type of BFP is appropriate for what application, as does the International Plumbing Code.
• Keep plant waste systems totally separate from the sanitary waste system. Consider having a separate “raw” waste system from the “finished” waste system.