Don’t trash recycling with cockroaches

Mountains of garbage, including food, have become the bane of most urban landscapes, and the desired haven of billions of scavenging insects including the hardiest of them all, cockroaches. So, China’s initiative to give hungry cockroaches a civic relevance by making them mobile waste assimilation units (MWAUs) is nothing short of brilliant. At a farm just outside Jinan in eastern Shandong province, 50 tonnes of kitchen waste a day are channelled to a billion ravenous roaches for ‘disposal’.

Not a bad life for a cockroach at a time when humans are being told that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Considering the sheer number of cockroaches available for duty in every region of the world as MWAUs, they truly offer an eco-friendly solution to the problem of increasing quantities of kitchen waste, especially as these resilient insects are not finicky eaters: Chinese, Indian, Continental, all (waste) food is eagerly consumed.

The numbers emerging from this pioneering Chinese programme are hard to ignore. A single farmer with 4,000 tonnes of giant MWAUs — a.k.a. American cockroaches that have an average lifespan of 700 days — can process 200 tonnes of food waste daily. And after 700 days? The well-fed roaches become ideal inputs for traditional Chinese medicine therapies for healing wounds. Talk about making a virtue out of vermin.