Japan is recycling food waste back into food with fermentation
)
Even as a boy, Koichi Takahashi knew he wanted to save the planet. He dreamed of building a future society that sustainably coexisted with nature through a loop of recycling and regeneration. Takahashi knew he couldn't remake the entire world himself, but as he got older, he realised that he could focus his energy on reforming one small corner of it.
Pig farms were the unlikely target that Takahashi settled on for his life's work. Specifically, he founded a company, the Japan Food Ecology Center, that creates a win-win solution by turning leftover human food into high-quality pig feed. "I wanted to build a model project for the circular economy," he says. "Instead of relying on imports for feed, we can make effective use of local food waste."
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 waste will have to be a part of those efforts, Takahashi says.
Ancient science, new solution
Takahashi's vision for creating a sustainable food loop was sparked in 1998 when the Japanese government launched a project promoting ways to convert otherwise wasted resources into livestock feed. The price for imported grain was rising at the time, and there was "a sense of crisis in Japan", Takahashi recalls. People felt the livestock industry would collapse if a solution was not found.
Rachel Nuwer: The food is sorted by hand when it arrives at the processing facility – and it receives around 40 tonnes per day (Credit: Rachel Nuwer)
Takahashi, who was then a practicing veterinarian, sensed an opportunity to put his farm animal expertise to use – and to simultaneously fulfill his desire to help the planet. As he learned more, though, he found there were no quick fixes, as simply sending raw food waste to farms was difficult. Major issues complicated the matter, including the highly varied content of food waste; the fact that food's high water content promotes spoilage; and that drying the food out to get around the water problem would require nearly as much energy as incinerating it.
To come up with a solution, Takahashi turned to a natural art that Japan has been perfecting for millennia: fermentation. "I realised that we already had the technology to create a product that could last long," he says.