Jinan, China - In the near pitch-dark, you
can hear them before you see them - millions of cockroaches
scuttling and fluttering across stacks of wooden boards as they
devour food scraps by the ton in a novel form of urban waste
disposal.
The air is warm and humid - just as cockroaches like it - to
ensure the colonies keep their health and voracious appetites.
Expanding Chinese cities are generating more food waste than
they can accommodate in landfills, and cockroaches could be a
way to get rid of hills of food scraps, providing nutritious
food for livestock when the bugs eventually die and, some say,
cures for stomach illness and beauty treatments.
On the outskirts of Jinan, capital of eastern Shandong
province, a billion cockroaches are being fed with 50 tons of
kitchen waste a day - the equivalent in weight to seven adult
elephants.
The waste arrives before daybreak at the plant run by
Shandong Qiaobin Agricultural Technology Co, where it is fed
through pipes to cockroaches in their cells.
Shandong Qiaobin plans to set up three more such plants next
year, aiming to process a third of the kitchen waste produced by
Jinan, home to about seven million people.
A nationwide ban on using food waste as pig feed due to
African swine fever outbreaks is also spurring the growth of the
cockroach industry.
"Cockroaches are a bio-technological pathway for the
converting and processing of kitchen waste," said Liu Yusheng,
president of Shandong Insect Industry Association.
Cockroaches are also a good source of protein for pigs and
other livestock. "It's like turning trash into resources," said
Shandong Qiaobin chairwoman Li Hongyi.
In a remote village in Sichuan, Li Bingcai, 47, has similar
ideas.
Li, formerly a mobile phone vendor, has invested a million
yuan ($146,300) in cockroaches, which he sells to pig farms and
fisheries as feed and to drug companies as medicinal
ingredients.
His farm now has 3.4 million cockroaches.
"People think it's strange that I do this kind of business,"
Li said. "It has great economic value, and my goal is to lead
other villagers to prosperity if they follow my lead."
His village has two farms. Li's goal is to create 20.
Elsewhere in Sichuan, a company called Gooddoctor is rearing
six billion cockroaches.
"The essence of cockroach is good for curing oral and peptic
ulcers, skin wounds and even stomach cancer," said Wen Jianguo,
manager of Gooddoctor's cockroach facility.
Researchers are also looking into using cockroach extract in
beauty masks, diet pills and even hair-loss treatments.
At Gooddoctor, when cockroaches reach the end of their
lifespan of about six months, they are blasted by steam, washed
and dried, before being sent to a huge nutrient extraction tank.
Asked about the chance of the cockroaches escaping, Wen said
that would be worthy of a disaster movie but that he has taken
precautions.
"We have a moat filled with water and fish," he said. "If
the cockroaches escape, they will fall into the moat and the
fish will eat them all."