Chennai, Jan 4 (IANS) India will soon bring a legislation to allow extraction of nutritional ingredients from slaughterhouse waste, which will then be sold in the market as protein supplements, the Central Pollution Control Board chief said here Tuesday.

The total availability of offal/bones in the country generated from large slaughterhouses is estimated at more than 21 lakh tonnes.

The national pollution control body, under the environment ministry, is also working on stringent rules to regulate bio-medical waste in the country.

'India generates 0.123 million tonnes of biomedical waste. Of these, about 0.089 million tonnes (72.5 percent) is treated while about 27.5 percent waste remains untreated. It has to be taken seriously as the untreated biomedical waste can cause infection,' CPCB chairman S.P. Gautam told IANS on the sidelines of the ongoing Indian Science Congress here.

He said the CPCB is developing new technology for waste minimisation and management.

'We have developed a technology for saltless preservation of hides/skins by lypholization in tannery. We have already got the patent for this and will commercialise it in the next two months,' he said.

The pollution control body is also working to prepare an environment information system on GPS, providing all environment related information.

The Indian Science Congress 2011 being held at SRM University campus here is the 98th congress to be held in India uninterrupted since 1914. It was inaugurated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Monday.

Established on the lines of the British model of Conference on the Advancement of Science, the first congress was held in January 1914 at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta with 150 scientists both from India and abroad.

Chennai is hosting the congress for the seventh time, 12 years after the last one here in 1999.

Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Ada Yonath, Thomas Steiesitz, Tim Hunt, Martin Chalfie, besides over 7,000 delegates and 3,000 students are participating in the congress.

There are 16 plenary sessions on different topics like chemistry of the future, science policy for the next five years, space, climate change, energy security, drugs, therapy and prevention of cancer, biodiversity, recent advances in asthma research.