Japan is recycling food waste back into food with fermentation

MicroWave@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 282 points – Japan is recycling food waste back into food with fermentation
bbc.com

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Japan's small size and mountainous terrain present challenges for food self-sufficiency. The country imports almost two-thirds of its food and three-quarters of its livestock feed. Yet each year, Japan throws out 28.4 million tonnes of food – much of it edible.

This comes with steep environmental and economic costs. Compared to many countries, consumers in Japan pay higher prices for food because so much of it is imported. And they also pay taxes to cover the majority of the 800bn yen (£4.2bn/$5.4bn) the country spends each year on waste incineration. Food makes up about 40% of the rubbish that Japan incinerates, and incineration produces significant air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

As the world's fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, Japan has set goals of cutting emissions by 46% by 2030 and becoming fully carbon neutral by 2050. Tackling food wastewill have to be a part of those efforts, Takahashi says.

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Feeding food scraps to pigs, what a novel idea!

Wouldn't the pigs get sick?

Unlikely, pigs are omnivores, their stomachs are iron

Humans are also omnivores though, pigs must be different in another important way

True, but humans are like the shittiest omnivores. They need to cook their food to digest it properly. Pigs have no such weakness, they root around in the dirt and eat whatever they find with no issue.

Other than the cooking thing, which is more us understanding it's better for us than a hard requirement, humans are actually amazing omnivores. Dogs and wolves are some of our closest competitors there and we're still miles ahead.

Okay, but are we amazing in that we can eat almost anything that is clean and fresh, or that we can handle unclean things filled with bacteria/ other unpleasantness?

My impression is that it's the first, we can have a very varied diet unlike most other animals who are a bit more specialised (or in some cases very specialised), but my dog regularly eats things that would turn my stomach inside out.

Yeah but no one gives a fuck about their health so long as taste is fine and price is cheap

Ignoring even any ethical concerns, that's just not true. Livestock is something that commercial farmers do not want to be unhealthy because it creates costs, problems, and spreads.

Death is famously the peak of health

At slaughter, it stops being a hog and starts being pork but, whilst there are other bacterial and similar concerns, it isn't being fed anymore at that point.

Before slaughter, some farmers sell feeder pigs for other people to raise until slaughter. In order to get paid, no one in that chain wants to actively harm their health if only because it impacts their bottom line.

A non-animal way of looking at it would be producing mushrooms on some media. If I could safely and effectively grow my mushrooms on a medium that recycles something without otherwise damaging them on cheaper/greener material, why wouldn't I do that? Conversely, why would I if that material ended up costing me more in the long run by stunting growth or something?

I was pretty surprised that recycling food waste is not common thing around the world.

The county I live in (Northern California) requires that household food waste go into the curbside compost bin, or home compost. They do random checks to make sure you haven’t put any food in the landfill bin and you can get a fine.

It gets turned into compost for landscaping, along with the yard waste, not food though.

This is state law in California. Enforcement differs in each area. I don't believe Oakland checks.

I live in South Korea and we've been doing national recycling ever since I could remember.

this thing calculates the weight of your food waste and charges you for the exact amount you throw out. These are everywhere. I think it's neat, especially considering that other countries are not doing the same thing...

That is neat! But since it charges you to put things in, wouldn't that encourage people to just throw their food in the trash? Or is that discouraged somehow?

When I lived in Seoul, stores sold different colored bags on behalf of the city for every type of waste disposal. They will only pick up the official bags and they were transparent-ish so it was easy for them to see whether you were breaking the bag type rules.

So, even if these receptacles charge money, I expect it would be cheaper than regular trash.

Interesting! Does the curbside program bill you by weight as well? That sounds labor intensive, compared to here where you just rent the $small, $$medium or $$$large bin and pay quarterly regardless of use. And recycling and composting are free.

curbside trash will only get picked up if it's in the official bags, which are priced by size(1L, 5L... all the way up to 50L-75L)

OH, I get it. The pick up price is the purchase price. That's pretty clever. Does that mean the trash collectors have to pick every bag up by hand and glance at the contents? How many categories of trash/bag are there?

How many categories of trash/bag are there?

Two, basically. Green one is for normal, yellow one is for food waste. Grey one is for recyclable stuff which I've never seen for myself which I assume is because there's almost always a different company that handles them. There are some special bags for something like glass, dirt...etc which I have no personal experience with. But that's just a bit fancier normal bag so only two it is: normal and food waste bag.

Those kind of machines I've showed earlier are very common but only in big apartment complexes, which is, still, one of the most common housing in South Korea. If there's no such machine near you, you'll just have to buy bags for food waste.

Trash collectors don't really take a hard look at the contents but when it's so obvious that there's food waste in a normal bag, it's about $100 fine for you and the garbage won't get collected.

But in reality, quite a lot of people do throw out food waste in a normal bag, not specifically because food waste bag is significantly more expensive(I'm not sure if it actually is more expensive or not. It's such an insignificant amount of money for me to track) but because convenience.

If you go shopping in South Korea, there's a pretty good chance you'll get plastic bag like this. This works as both shopping bag and normal waste bag. Pretty neat(although they tear easier than any other bags ☹)

In my corner of Japan, they just ask to separate it out and wet it down (presumably to prevent too much getting to hot and causing potential melting/burning). I'm rural enough that I and others around here compost on our own. Some parts of Japan have optional composting. I'm not immediately aware of anywhere that has required separation of and/or compositing of organics.

They started setting up composting bins around the NYC. Most of them are full of glass bottles and plastic dog poop bags.

My mom actually made us clean our plate (eat it all) because there were starving children in China.

It was a different time.

there are a lot of starving children in China being permanently affected by perpetual malnutrition and starvation.

https://www.wfp.org/countries/china

this article is about Japanese food waste innovation, btw, not Chinese.

I mean, I think the poster's point was that they had no leftovers because their parents forced them to eat it all with the given excuse. I had the same thing growing up.

That's pretty cool. They say it produces good pork, I wonder how the pigs feel about it vs other feed.

They asked one of the pigs and it said it was OinK.

If watching youtubers who raise hogs is any indication, anywhere between not caring at all to being enthused. Hogs are really not picky about their food for the most part and it's not uncommon to add liquid to the feed in general.

2 more...

Just in the last couple weeks I had beer and pasta which were made with recycled bread. I thought that was pretty cool.

It needs to be transformed? Most people I know just dump the scraps right into the pig trough.

Well, they do like their natto over there, so I’m confident they can find a way to stomach this.

A unique fermentation method being piloted in Japan transforms edible leftovers and scraps into sustainable feed for pigs.

You might've missed a detail.

Haha. You're right. I totally missed that. Try natto some time, though.

I can eat it, at least the cut, less slimy type, but I still don't like it and no amount of trying it over the years has changed that. Even dried natto as a snack nearly made me gag because my body is just screaming "this is too much rot" no matter what I tell it.

They've been doing this in Korea for more than a decade. It's a bit annoying being mandated to throw your food scraps out separately, but it's good to know the refuse is reused.

Wait? Japan pays high prices for food? It was mind bogglingly cheap when I was there.