Recycling of domestic food waste a swill idea

INFORMATION recently published suggests that household edible food wastage in Australia runs into billions of dollars annually. That is obscene when you realise that huge numbers of people around the world are starving. It has been suggested that each household should have separate bins to collect waste food. But what do you do with it then? Unless properly handled it can soon become a smelly maggot-ridden problem. In England back in the ’50s and ’60s there was a company called “Walls”. They produced the vast majority of pork sausages consumed in England (as well as icecream). The pork came from “swill” fed pigs. Waste food was collected daily, taken to a processing factory where it was cooked at high temperatures and thus sterilised. It was then turned into a liquid broth. The pig farm was connected by a pipeline to the processing factory and the “swill” was fed to the pigs. The pigs loved it, you could almost see them growing. Unfortunately the system was banned in the ’70s due to the risk of introducing disease, namely swine fever, through imported meat products in the swill. The risk was caused by slack operators not following set-out guidelines for the separation of raw food waste from the sterile end product. With tightly controlled procedures in place there is no reason that the system couldn’t work and effectively recycle domestic food waste. The product could even be dried and pelleted to be fed to other animals. The methane collected from the pig dung could be used to fire the cookers.