“Like the fermentation researchers who came before him, Takahashi was looking for a way, as Lee puts it, ‘to take what might otherwise simply be waste and transform it into something useful, in the process creating new industries.’

Working with researchers from government, universities and national institutes, Takahashi used his veterinary knowledge to craft a lactic acid-fermented, liquified feed product for pigs. The team had to engage in lengthy troubleshooting. ‘When we fed the early test feed to the pigs, they grew slower and their meat was too fatty,’ Takahashi recalls. Over the course of ‘a series of failures’, they eventually got the nutritional content right. They also found a way to extend the shelf life of the ‘ecofeed’, as they called their product, by lowering the pH to 4.0, a level at which most pathogenic bacteria cannot survive…

The centre is making a profit off the 35,000 tons of food waste it processes each year. ‘We’re subverting the conventional notion that environmental efforts don’t pay, or that recycling is just too expensive,’ Takahashi says. Because his goal is ‘to change society’, he adds, he did not take out any patents on the technology, allowing others to replicate his method.”

From BBC.