Zero Loss Recycling

There is a company that collects food waste generated by grocery stores and restaurants, processes it and ships it out as pig feed. It is the Japan Food Ecology Center, whose headquarters are in Sagamihara City, Kanagawa Prefecture.

The food waste it uses for raw materials includes bread scraps and noodle scraps from food manufacturers' factories, cooked rice and milk from restaurants and vegetable scraps from supermarkets and other small retailers. It uses specialized refrigerator trucks to collect the material from some 180 suburban factories and stores and carry it to its recycling plant. It mixes water with the collected food waste, sterilizes it, performs lactic fermentation and ships the resulting liquid fermented feed to pigpens.