Never in the history of mankind have concerns with regard to climate change and its impact on how the Earth functions been so high up on the agenda as today. Throughout the world, scientists and researchers are looking for ways to both combat pollution and to find solutions for a more sustainable life, reusing resources to meet the increasing needs of a population that just keeps on growing.
In Japan, MUSCA is one of the companies that is striving for a better future. Since 2016, it has been attempting to develop a technology, based on flies and larvae, to create a recycling system designed for the reuse of organic waste such as excrement and food remains, and to transform it into the basis of sustainable agriculture and food. The project has picked up speed in the last few years, but its origins date back to the former Soviet Union, where scientists pursued the idea of using house flies – Musca domestica, the scientific name after which the Japanese company was later named – as a means of achieving food self-sufficiency on board future manned journeys to Mars.
The goal devised by the brains of the former USSR was to make the insects feed on the astronauts' feces through the selective breeding of productive and resistant flies. The next step would be to make use of the flies´ droppings as a fertiliser and of the larvae, rich in protein, as food. The Houseflies project, part of the Soviet space programme, never left the stratosphere, but was later acquired by Kazutoshi Kobayashi, a Japanese citizen who took the results of the research to the country of origin in the hope of being able to apply the study to sustainable agriculture.
Mitsutaka Kushima, the founder of MUSCA
In 2006, the ambitious project was passed on to one of its employees, Mitsutaka Kushima, which gave rise to MUSCA, the company that is now attempting to transform tons of organic waste into fuel to supply a greener future.
INVESTING IN SUSTAINABILITY
What was, until a few years ago, a niche market, has been promoting the emergence of an increasing number of insect farmers and breeders around the world, looking for alternative forms of protein to the traditional ones obtained from the meat and bones of animals. The fast food giant McDonald's is one of the corporate leviathans that has been backing studies looking for ways of using insects and algae to feed chickens, in order to reduce dependence on foods like soy, responsible for a huge wave of deforestation all over the world.
In Japan alone, MUSCA says around 80 million tons of organic waste from animals and over 360 million tons of food are wasted every year. The potential, argues the senior management of the startup, is therefore enormous. To provide an idea of the potential gains, the variety of flies that MUSCA has been enhancing over the years is capable of transforming waste in just one week, while traditional house flies take three weeks to complete the same process.
The waste transformation procedure promoted by MUSCA processes waste in a single week
It is said that an average of 300 grams of fly eggs are capable of generating 150 pounds of larvae, which can transform a ton of organic animal waste into 300 pounds of fertiliser. This enables us to both reuse resources and to reduce the market price of these products. Moreover, greenhouse gas emissions from animal excrement can be reduced by 99% using this system, which also prevents the contamination of soil and groundwater.
A future driven and created based on flies may be one of the solutions capable of changing the way in which we produce, enabling us to reduce waste and to create an increasingly sustainable horizon.