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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

It's not easy to convert waste to a commodity. Recycling has a big problem with this - if the waste isn't provided in the right way, then it's totally useless (ie. plastics need to be completely clean, all food waste has to be washed out, otherwise it just goes to the landfill).

What if different breweries output different quality waste? Some is too watery, some too thick. Is it now worth it to reprocess this waste to make it usable? Is the collection and processing of this waste cheaper than just growing food for the flies?

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>It's not easy to convert waste to a commodity. Recycling has a big problem with this - if the waste isn't provided in the right way, then it's totally useless (ie. plastics need to be completely clean, all food waste has to be washed out, otherwise it just goes to the landfill).

We need to acknowledge that the requirements of 'almost-perfection' required in our recycling stream is something we built into it. We had reusable systems that operated without issue for decades that we discarded in favor of modern co-mingled recycling (which is obviously failing us). There's no rule of recycling or reusing that says the parent material needs to be pristine in its condition to be recycled, thats a rule we introduced because of how 'we' thought to do recycling. We could build re-usability back into our systems, we are choosing not to do so.

The article makes it pretty clear that the soldier flies aren't fussy at all:

“They’re generalists,” Tomberlin says, and eat just about anything. Pig manure? Check. Human waste? Check. Food scraps? Check. The only organic materials they haven’t had luck with are bones, hair and pineapple rinds, he says.

For these maggots, our waste is it's fuel. Biology's produced a whole bunch of bizarre, extremely niche DNA coded self replicating machines. If the machinery is already there, and the ethical concerns are minimal, why not exploit them?

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