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THOUSANDS OF VORACIOUS white maggots wiggle frenetically while tearing through trayfuls of leftover meat, vegetables and fruits in an unusual farm in southwestern China.
It may not be a pretty sight, but the gluttonous larvae could help China eat away something far uglier: the country’s mountain of food waste.
The individual larvae of black soldier flies, which are native to the Americas, can each eat double their weight of garbage every day, according to experts. The farm in Sichuan province then turns the bugs into a high-protein animal feed and their faeces into an organic fertiliser.
“These bugs are not disgusting. They are for managing food waste. You have to look at this from another angle,” said Hu Rong, the manager of the farm near the city of Pengshan.
There’s no shortage of grub for the larvae: Each person throws away almost 30 kilos of food per year in China, a nation of 1.4 billion people.
“On average, one kilo of maggots can eat two kilos of rubbish in four hours,” Hu said.
Hu buys the discarded food from Chengwei Environment, a company that collects such waste from 2,000 restaurants in the city of Chengdu.
“If you put a fish in there, the only thing that comes out is its white skeleton,” Chengwei Environment director Wang Jinhua said.
Chickens and fish
One third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted, while some 870 million people are going hungry, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
This waste also exacerbates pollution problems. In a 2011 report the FAO said that if food waste were a country, it would rank behind only the US and China for greenhouse gas emissions.
Each year, China produces a total of 40 million tonnes of food waste — the equivalent weight of 110 Empire State Buildings.
But there are cultural reasons behind the issue, Wang said.
“When you invite someone to dine at a restaurant, the custom is to always order more dishes than necessary, to show your hospitality. Inevitably, the leftovers are thrown out,” he said.
But the black soldier fly, a rather long and slender critter, does more than eliminate waste.
Once fattened, some of the larvae are sold live or dried to feed animals such as chickens, fish, and turtles. They boast a nutritious composition: up to 63 percent protein and 36 percent lipids.
The maggots make it possible to recover proteins and fat still present in waste, then return the nutrients into the human food cycle through the livestock.
The larval faeces can even be used as organic fertiliser in agriculture.
China, Canada, Australia, and South Africa are among the countries where it is legal to feed poultry and fish with insects.
“It’s more restricted in the United States and in the European Union,” said Christophe Derrien, secretary general of the International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed, a non-profit representing Europe’s insect production sector.
The EU will allow insect protein as feed in fish farms from July, Derrien said.
“It’s an encouraging first step because the EU is opening up to this more and more,” he said.
Profitable?
Recycling food waste may offer an economic benefits as well as environmental ones.
Hu makes a comfortable living selling live black soldier fly larvae and fertiliser.
Taking into account costs (electricity, labour, delivery fees, and the price of waste), she makes an annual profit between 200,000 and 300,000 yuan (€26,000 to €39,500) – a large sum in China.
It is no wonder, then, that black soldier fly farms have been surfacing all over China since the first sites appeared in the country three years ago.
“This year, we expect to open three or four new sites around Chengdu,” Wang said.
“The idea is to transform waste into useful substances.”
Leftovers are not the only thing that could get a second life in China.
Chinese energy firm Sinopec plans to build next year a factory in eastern Zhejiang province to turn cooking oil – which is sometimes illegally reused in restaurants – into biofuel for passenger planes.
- © AFP 2017.
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Retrofitting is only available to the people with plenty of cash . Same as most other benefits .
All I read in the above article is that we need to lower our living standards drastically. I do not trust anyone who tells me we need to eat less meat and then replace it with processed crap.
@An Drew Bearla: Yes, all that came out of the big meeting in Davos is that we must stop eating meat and dairy or the world will starve, and we must share our cars or cycle or walk, all the mullarkey Ryan is spouting and all from a bunch that then sat down to a four course meat laden lunch after flying in on 1500 private jets. The narrative to blame the ordinary consumer and deflect away from their lavish carbon laden lifestyles is ridiculous. Animal farm springs to mind
Will do this, will improve that. All talk and no action. The government has no motivation to implement any of these policies. Still using diesel commuter trains ffs.
@Tomo: We are making progress faster than ever before. I would live to speed it up too, but denial of what’s happening is nor helpful.
Bottom line is what comes out of our chimneys and out of the vehicle tailpipes isn’t good for us and has resulted in worse health for our population and more deaths. Even if you think climate change isn’t real (it is) then only a fool would continue to not tackle us poisoning ourselves.
@Barry Somers: a few more new taxes will sort everything.
That’s the problem, the greens solution is to tax the problem with no alternative. Of course, people are turning against it
@Jim Buckley Barrett: Not true.
@Nicholas McMurry: Yes it is true. Tax tax tax from a fella that knows about as much about climate change as my 8yr old. All the solutions Eamo is pushing for at present are financially or infrastructurally unviable like hydrogen which is inhibitively expensive to make or offshore wind which we have no way due to planning restrictions and lack of infrastructure make, but which are the chief objectives of E3G which ol Eamo is/was a senior associate of, as usual the self serving bull we have gotten used to in Irish politics. Any man that signs off on tax incentives for fuel for private jets and the writing off of carbon footprint for such is not green. No viable alternatives for anything, no reduction in our carbon footprint despite all the waffle, lying about our agricultural footprint throwing our farmers and food producers under a bus because they are a soft target while letting big corporations off the hook by giving them all our carbon credits from our grasslands, hedgegrows and forestry. Ireland is not one of the worst polluters as we are so often told to justify taxing the life out of us we just fall foul of the carbon credit rules that the large industrial countries set up to make themselves look far better than they really are, America, Germany France etc
@Nicholas McMurry: of course its true, if the government and greens in particular wanted to actually do something that wasn’t a punitive tax measure, it would be a shock.
Insulation is the most effective measure, yet they persist in making the retrofitting policy, part of the convoluted seai scheme which requires “trained” certified installers, when homeowners could, depending on their current skills learn to install it just as effectively themselves, by watching a few instructional videos, just like the “trained” installers did…
Subsidising insulation for domestic projects with a zero vat rate, would encourage more people to retrofit insulation to their homes themselves, reducing the amount of heating from all sources, along with particulate and carbon emissions across the board.
Better put the old age pension up. Where will all the food come from? More homes will be needed.
Anyone find those TRVs (main image) a complete waste of time?
I find that after a year the da*n thing is stuck on full heat. (I’ve checked the pin underneath and it seems to move freely) Was this just another way for the plumbers to make a few bucks :) ?
So, if we live in England or Wales and insulate our homes we could live for 836,000 years. I don’t want to live that long.
Why does an article in an Irish publication write about a foreign country without stipulating that it is a study done in that foreign country?
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