Japan feeds animals recycled leftovers

By Risa Maeda

SAKURA, Japan (Reuters) - With animal feed and fertilizer prices at record highs, Japan's food recycling industry is seeing greater demand than ever before for pellets for pigs and poultry made from recycled leftovers.

Japan disposes of some 20 millions tonnes of food waste a year, five times as much as world food aid to the poor in 2007. The leftovers used to be dumped in land fills where they decomposed and produced the greenhouse gas methane.

But government legislation since 2001 has spurred a recycling industry that turns food scraps into animal feed and fertilizer, or ships leftovers off to facilities where the methane gas produced by rotting food is harnessed to power industrial plants.

"Given higher fuel and feed prices, the (food recycling) business is on the rise now," said Yasufumi Miwa, researcher at Japan Research Institute Ltd.

Farmers had been loathe to use recycled animal feed, but rising feed prices have made them more receptive to recycled feed, which is about 50 percent cheaper than regular feed.

A pig farm in Akita Prefecture, northern Japan, has offset a 20 percent jump in compound feed prices in the past year by making its own recycled feed from scraps disposed by local food manufacturers.

"We could have faced a critical situation this year if we didn't produce feed by ourselves," said Hideki Sato, a spokesman at Sugayo Co, which currently raises 20,000 pigs.

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