TEAM USING INSECTS TO SEEK NEW SOLUTIONS TO THE FOOD WASTE PROBLEM
How do you solve a problem like food waste? Fly larvae, apparently - millions of them.
Cambridge-based start-up Entomics has recently received a £900,000 grant from Innovate UK for its new process which sees organic waste broken down by fly larvae to produce animal feed and organic fertiliser - a solution that the company hopes can address both the huge levels of food waste (around 1.3 billion tonnes of food waste is thrown away every year globally) and the pressures created by a growing need for food production (the UN predicts that 70 per cent more food will have to be created by 2050).
McLaren explains to Resource: “We were all passionate about food waste as a problem to be solved. So using our different skills - some of the team have an engineering background, some have a biological and biochemistry background – we looked at the issue as a blank page problem and leveraged some existing scientific literature around insect bioconversion.”
The basic idea is easy enough to grasp: the black soldier fly larvae are extremely voracious eaters, and can eat enormous quantities of food waste. As McLaren describes: “In doing so, they get rid of 95 per cent of the food waste by volume and metabolise this relatively low value feedstock into proteins and fats. Those two compounds are a lot more chemically complex and useful and have a higher value in the market.”
