Food Producers, Farmers Team up to Turn Food Waste into Liquid Feed

Responding to a call from the Japanese non-profit organization (NPO) Mie Slow Life Society, food producers and pig farmers in central Japan's Mie Prefecture are moving ahead with joint plans to make liquid pig feed using food waste. Producers of bread, noodles, confectionary, soymilk and alcoholic drinks are expected to supply waste products, and joint investment with livestock farmers will fund the establishment of a cooperative within the current financial year (2006-7), with commercial operations due to begin in 2008.

Using food waste as the basic ingredient for a liquid end product, liquid feed can utilize a wider range of waste products than dry feed. Its advantages include ensuring uniformly high nutritional quality and preventing porcine respiratory diseases which dry feed can cause.

Mie Slow Life focuses on food, farming and the environment, and looks for ways to establish a new, recycling-based society as an alternative to the conventional tendency to favor mass production and mass consumption. The goals of this project are the production of safe and tasty pork, and the practical use of food waste, but another likely benefit is an increase in the rate of animal feed self-sufficiency.

Through this project, Mie Slow Life has become even more aware of the extent to which food is being thrown away and wasted. The NPO says that it wishes to change future practices and attitudes in the food processing industry, beginning with the maximum possible reduction in food waste, followed by efforts to make full use of any waste still produced.



Posted: 2006/10/30 08:01:04 AM
Japanese version