On Dec. 22, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) inspected a kitchen waste heat treatment plant in Yunlin County’s Huwei Township (虎尾), where she reiterated that heating kitchen leftovers to more than 90°C for an hour or more prevents infectious diseases from being spread when they are used as animal feed.
However, on Wednesday last week, the day after newly elected local officials were sworn in, Yunlin County Commissioner Chang Li-shan (張麗善) issued a ban on feeding kitchen waste to pigs.
Premier William Lai (賴清德) said that imposing a ban on feeding kitchen leftovers to pigs before complementary measures are in place would mean sending the leftovers to incinerators. This would impose an even heavier burden on facilities that are already hard pushed to process general waste.
As to the idea that kitchen leftovers should be made into compost, it would be difficult at this stage. The nation’s composting plants do not have enough capacity to handle it.
Furthermore, most of them are designed to process raw kitchen leftovers that mainly consist of fruit and vegetables, so cooked kitchen leftovers that contain meat would cause them to break down. That is why cooked kitchen leftovers have been reused as pig feed rather than compost.
Although the Environmental Protection Administration has been upgrading composting plants’ capabilities — by installing dehydration pretreatment equipment, among others — the process takes time and existing plants would not be able to cope with a sudden influx of cooked leftovers.
Yunlin County is the largest hog producer in the nation, and it relies on private composting plants because there are no government-run ones.
An average-sized pig weighs 60kg and can eat about 7kg to 8kg of kitchen leftovers every day, so a farm that raises 1,000 pigs can consume the daily kitchen leftovers produced by a town of 30,000 to 40,000 people.
If those leftovers were not fed to pigs, it would be very expensive to dispose of them in some other way.
The government should take a positive view of the contribution that feeding kitchen leftovers to pigs makes to protecting the environment.
It should use some of the money earmarked for building incinerators to help businesses that process kitchen waste to install better-functioning heat treatment equipment and to improve their wastewater treatment, thereby closing disease prevention loopholes and preventing secondary pollution.
An alternative would be to set up more concentrated heat treatment plants, such as the one in Huwei, and sell the heat-treated kitchen leftovers to pig farmers, thus avoiding the potential problem of individual operators not heating the swill thoroughly enough.
Another alternative would be to follow the examples of South Korea, Japan and other nations by dehydrating kitchen waste to turn it into dry fodder. Although this high-temperature drying process is expensive, it would eliminate any worries about safety, hygiene and environmental protection. If the government adopts any of these options, it should subsidize operators for the expenses involved.
It is of course essential to guard against African swine fever, but to immediately prohibit feeding kitchen leftovers to pigs is tantamount to cutting off pig farmers’ means of subsistence.
This issue must be considered at the level of national pig-raising policy, rather than having any single city or county decide its own policies.
Chen Wen-ching is president of the Environment and Development Foundation.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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