bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

sponsorType

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Agence France-Presse

Thousands of voracious white maggots wiggle frenetically while tearing through trays of leftover meat, vegetables and fruit at an unusual farm in southwest 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.
The Hong Kong chef who turns waste food into fine-dining feast, and others finding uses for unwanted food items
“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 kg of food per year in China, a nation of 1.4 billion people.
“On average, one kilogram of maggots can eat two kilograms 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 Chengdu.
“If you put a fish in there, the only thing that comes out is its white skeleton,” Chengwei Environment director Wang Jinhua said. 
One third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year – about 1.3 billion tonnes – gets lost or wasted, while some 870 million people are going hungry, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.
This waste also exacerbates pollution problems. The UN food agency said in a 2011 report that if food waste were a country, it would rank behind only the US and China for greenhouse gas emissions.
China produces a total of 40 million tonnes of food waste a year, 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 per cent protein and 36 per cent 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 group 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.
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, she makes an annual profit between 200,000 yuan (US$29,000) and 300,000 yuan, a large sum in China.
Food celebrity chef Bourdain rails against food waste at New York’s Tribeca film festival
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 a factory next year in eastern Zhejiang province to turn cooking oil – which is sometimes illegally reused in restaurants – into biofuel for passenger planes.


How maggots can put China’s mountains of food waste to good use

Black soldier fly larvae at a farm in Pengshan in Sichuan province. Photo: AFP

This picture taken on February 23, 2017 shows a Hu Rong, manager of a farm, checking black soldier fly larvae in Pengshan, in southwest China's Sichuan province. The larvae of black soldier flies, which are native to the Americas, can devour double their weight of garbage every day. The farm in Sichuan province then turns the bugs into a high-protein animal feed and their feces into an organic fertiliser. / AFP PHOTO / WANG Zhao / TO GO WITH China environment food animal agriculture,FEATURE by Ludovic EHRET

This picture taken on February 23, 2017 shows Hu Rong, the manager of a black soldier fly farm, walking on her farm in Pengshan, in southwest China's Sichuan province. The larvae of black soldier flies, which are native to the Americas, can devour double their weight of garbage every day. The farm in Sichuan province then turns the bugs into a high-protein animal feed and their feces into an organic fertiliser. / AFP PHOTO / WANG Zhao / TO GO WITH China environment food animal agriculture,FEATURE by Ludovic EHRET

News

China

People & Culture

The grubs can much through tonnes of waste a day, creating animal feed and fertiliser


How maggots can put China’s mountains of food waste to good use

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The grubs can much through tonnes of waste a day, creating animal feed and fertiliser

The grubs can much through tonnes of waste a day, creating animal feed and fertiliser