Japan Uses Recycled Leftovers as Animal Feed
July 30, 2008 · Print This Article
Japan has gotten resourceful with their animal feed: they’re putting the country’s huge amounts of food waste to work. The country disposes of approximately 20,000 tons of food every year, which decomposed in landfills, filling the air with the greenhouse gas methane. In 2001, the Japanese government put laws into effect that led to a new kind of recycling industry – one where those food scraps are either turned into animal feed and fertilizer, or allowed to decompose in special facilities that harness the methane to power industrial plants.
From Reuters:
Food recyclers often use leftovers from convenience stores and restaurants where strict health laws mean unsold items must be thrown out at the end of the day.
“They don’t take disposed food from households as they are not in good conditions,” said Miwa.
Japan imports about 75 percent of its feedstocks from abroad. It is the world’s biggest corn importer to feed animals.
But recent price hikes due to high corn and soy meal prices, the main ingredients in animal feed, has made recycled feed more popular. Although it still accounts for only 1 percent of feedstocks in Japan, or about 150,000 tonnes in 2006, double the volume of 2003. In Japan, companies such as food manufacturers, retailers and restaurants produce some 11 million tonnes of food waste a year. They are responsible for disposing the waste, often paying hefty fees to have it carted away and dumped.
It sounds as if the animals are being carefully monitored to avoid any health issues that may result from this process, and the recyclers are careful to remove inedible items from the food waste before it’s recycled.
Getting smart about waste, trash, food and greenhouse gases: we need to see a lot more of this sort of thing going forward.
Link [Reuters]
Photo credit: REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao
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What a great idea. I have always wondered if there was a better option than to just trash my old leftovers. Is there any kind of initiative like this in the states? It’s important for us, as individuals, to support these and other innovative ideas. For example, http://www.simplestop.net stops your postal junk mail and benefits the environment.
This is really cool - i wonder what the actual process is to get it like that ? There are so many ways for us to re-use things- i think as the money and resources get tight, suddenly bunches of people will come up with brilliant ideas…!
A great new idea? Sounds like de ja vue all over again to me. I’m old enough to remember when every tenament house had a few swill pots in the back court. These metal pots were picked up regularly and replaced with a clean pot. The collectors would then sell to the hog and chicken farmers. It was a business. We weren’t always the sofisticated throw away society we are now.