January 8, 2007

 

Indonesian businessman to convert city's rubbish into chicken feed

 

 

As chicken producers in the west fret about the high cost of corn for chicken feed, businessmen in Indonesia has hit upon using rubbish to feed chickens, giving new meaning to the term fowl food.

 

To work, the project still has to convince a still doubtful government and those in animal husbandry, but Surabayan businessman Ron Kho is optimistic they, along with investors, would be won over.

 

The idea may not be as absurd as it seems, as chickens would eat almost anything, Kho said.

 

Kho's partner, Sam Salpietro from Western Australia, who owns Australian company BioCulture, was equally upbeat.

 

The partners even shipped their product to Australia as they were dissatisfied with local lab analysis of their product.

 

The partners have their analysis from the Western Australian government's chemical laboratory, which they presented to potential investors in Surabaya recently.

 

Each day, Surabaya, Indonesia's second biggest city produces 3,000 tonnes of rubbish. Teams of the city's human scavengers remove tonnes of plastic, glass, wood and other recyclable long before it gets to the landfill.

 

This meant much of what remains is organic material, which theoretically can be eaten. A 30 percent organic recovery was expected initially but initial production yielded 50 percent, Kho said.

 

The duo suggests a low-tech process to convert these organic waste into chicken pellets that could be sold at a profit.

 

Moreover, the garbage dumps, with half the load removed, would then last twice as long, thus killing two birds with one stone.

 

In western countries, where labour costs are high, the company would have difficulty getting people to wade through the rubbish, processing it into chicken food, but not in Indonesia.

 

The project can only work in developing countries where labour is cheap, Kho said adding that most of the work would be manual.

 

Whatever gets picked in the selection process would be cooked and processed to remove impurities. Extra nutrients would be added and the mix forced through an extruder to make pellets, Kho said. 

 

Kho estimates high quality poultry feed can be made in this way for about US$75 a tonne, compared to feed manufacturers who are charging US$250 a tonne, he said.

 

In fact, he is trying to get existing animal feed companies to invest in the venture.

 

Still, the fact that it would be virtually impossible to guarantee a consistent quality from rubbish feed would send them running. Moreover, there could be toxic objects which may have escaped the selection process, done by hand.

 

For example, expired drugs may be found in the rubbish and chickens feeding on them may be poisoned by its drug content. Other ingredients of the rubbish feed may even include dead rats, which lived and died in every corner of the city dump.

 

Kho countered that the organic waste would be pasteurized and extensive laboratory testing would reject suspect feed.

 

He also added that magnets would pull out metallic objects and closed circuit TV would monitor every stage. The end product would be food-quality, Salpietro assured.

 

Still, Salpietro acknowledged the problems in such a system but added that someone has to be a pioneer and there has to be enough investors interested in putting up a US$25 million factory to go into production.

 

The duo said they already spent about A$1 million (US$790,000) and five years on the project. While there have been many people proposing systems claiming that it would help Indonesia's waste system, this is one which would generate income, he said.