Letting pests do what they do best pays off for urban garbage control

Just when it was starting to look like the world's garbage disposal dilemma was insurmountable, along comes this news, via Reuters, from the outskirts of Jinan, the capital of eastern Shandong province. It's beyond any recycling or even gene-editing breakthroughs — more like food-chain editing with a few win-win twists.

Picture this: a sea of cockroaches swarming and scavenging over a scaffolding of wooden boards gobbling up food scraps by the ton from kitchens all over the city. To be exact, a billion cockroaches and 50 tons of food scraps a day.

The site of this feeding frenzy is kept just like cockroaches like it —dark, warm and humid — to keep them healthy, happy and forever hungry.

The kitchen waste arrives before dawn at the plant, which is run by Shandong Qiaobin Agricultural Technology Company, where it is fed through pipes into the cockroach cells.

Why nourish pests that rank with rodents as one of the top banes of urban living?

It turns out that cockroaches are a great source of protein for pigs and other livestock.

A nationwide ban on using food waste as pig feed due to outbreaks of African swine fever is another good reason.

"Cockroaches are a biotechnological pathway for the converting and processing of kitchen waste," as Liu Yusheng, president of the Shandong Insect Industry Association, told Reuters.

The bugs are basically turning trash into a resource, and it's not just happening in Shandong province.

In a remote village in Sichuan, Li Bingcai, 47, a former mobile-phone vendor invested more than a million yuan in cockroaches — 3.4 million of them — that are farmed and sold as feed to pig farms and fisheries, as well as to drug companies for particular ingredients.

Li admits the optics of the enterprise may be a bit puzzling. "People think it's strange that I do this kind of business," said Li, who now has two farms and hopes to have as many as 20 someday. "It has great economic value, and my goal is to lead other villagers to prosperity if they follow my lead."

Elsewhere in the same province, a company called Gooddoctor is raising a crop of 6 billion cockroaches. Facility manager Wen Jianguo told Reuters, "The essence of cockroach is good for curing oral and peptic ulcers, skin wounds and even stomach cnacer."

Beauty masks, diet pills and a cure for baldness are also being touted as targets for the cure-all critters, who, at the end of their 6-month life spans, are blasted with steam, washed and dried and sent to a nutrient extraction tank — a term straight out of a Soylent Green nightmare.

In fact, Wen admitted that if 6 billion cockroaches managed to escape his enclosure, it would be worthy of a horror movie. After all, a cockroach is said to be able to live for a week without its head — thanks in part to the fact that they breathe through little holes throughout their body.

The pesky bugs can also hold their breath for 40 minutes and run up to 3 miles an hour.

"We have a moat filled with water and fish," Wen told Reuters. "If the cockroaches escape, they will fall into the moat and the fish will eat them."

Best idea may be to keep these Rumpelstiltskin roaches spinning trash into profits happy so they don't try to escape. Garbage all around! Eat your fill!

Contact the writer at chrisdavis@chinadailyusa.com.