72. The Committee recalled that its 30th session had agreed to circulate officially a working paper to invite government comments. The delegation of the United States, stressing the importance of water conservation, introduced a revised discussion paper and expressed the views that the reuse of processed water in food plants was becoming a more common practice in the world and that inadequate treatment of water was being recognized as a potential food safety problem.
73. The Committee expressed its appreciation to the Delegation of the United States for its work and recognized the need to discuss this issue. The Delegation of the United States proposed to incorporate these Guidelines into the General Principles of Food Hygiene (CAC/RCP 1-1969, Rev.3) as an Annex and also indicated that the title should be more general and refer to “Reuse” rather than “Recycling”.
74. Several delegations and the Observer from IDF pointed out that the practices of water reuse varied widely depending on the type of industry. Therefore, careful consideration should be given to the extent to which this generic Code would be applied. The Observer from IDF proposed that Section 5.5 of the General Principles of Food Hygiene should be reconsidered as its text was not in accordance with current practice.
75. The Committee had an exchange of views on whether to develop general guidelines or to develop sections on water reuse in specific commodity codes. It was also proposed to follow these two approaches simultaneously. It was agreed that the opinions of the Commodity Committees would be requested on this issue in view of their specific expertise.
76. The Committee agreed that the discussion paper should be further developed by the delegation of the United States with the assistance of the participants in the initial drafting[17] and that the paper should examine the concerns expressed in the discussion.
