Thousands of voracious white maggots wiggle frenetically while tearing through trayfuls of leftover meat, vegetables and fruit 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 feces into organic fertilizer.
PHOTO: AFP
“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 30kg 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.
PHOTO: AFP
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 feces can even be used as organic fertilizer 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 fertilizer.
Taking into account costs (electricity, labor, delivery fees and the price of waste), she makes an annual profit between 200,000 and 300,000 yuan (US$29,000 to US$43,500) — 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.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and