The tiny black water fly spawned a trillion-dollar industry

The main source of income from investment in black water fly is insect body feed and insect manure

"Do you smell it?" Huang Yongping, a researcher at the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Molecular Plant Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, grabbed a handful of insect feces produced by the larvae of the black water fly after eating wet garbage, and invited the visitors to come and smell it, who were surprised and curious about the odorless.

This scene is the same as the scene when Huang Yongping first came into contact with the black water fly three years ago. But at that time, no one knew the "working principle" of the black water fly larvae. Huang Yongping, who is engaged in insect research, did not stop at surprise and curiosity, and decided to find out. In the following two years, Huang Yongping's team conducted systematic research on the genome of black water fly and began to explore the "working principle" of black water fly larvae.

At that time, Tang Bin, chairman of Shengshen (Jiangsu) Bioenvironment Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Shengshen Environment), which was far away in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, was worried about the pilot project that had just taken over the use of black water fly biotransformation technology to treat kitchen waste. The early pretreatment cost of the black water fly biotransformation wet waste technology is high, the breeding method is extensive and unsustainable, the production capacity is not guaranteed, and the environmental impact cannot be effectively controlled, which makes the project face "shock death" at any time, so Tang Bin is always worried.

At the end of 2019, by chance, Tang Bin walked into the laboratory of Huang Yongping's team and saw hope again. At that time, Huang Yongping's team was conducting large-scale demonstration experiments in the laboratory.

The technical solution is gradually maturing

In 2017, Yu Ziniu, a professor at Huazhong Agricultural University who was the first to study black water flies in China, also grabbed a handful of insect droppings from black water fly larvae, so that Huang Yongping could smell it, and there was no peculiar smell. With curiosity, Huang Yongping, Yu Ziniu and foreign scholar Professor Jeffery Tomberlin quickly formed a research team.

As an expert in insect research, Huang Yongping is no stranger to black water fly. He introduced to China Science Daily that black water fly is a saprophytic insect, which can convert organic waste such as livestock manure, kitchen waste, agricultural and sideline products scraps into protein and fat as food, which has been promoted and applied all over the world.

During its lifetime, the black water fly goes through four stages: egg, larva, pupae and adult. The stage of being able to feed and participate in the treatment of organic waste is mainly the larval stage, and the main products produced by the larvae of the black water fly after the transformation of organic waste are insect feces and larval bodies. Insect manure can be used directly as organic fertilizer, and the harvested larvae can be processed into animal protein feed additives, so the black water fly larvae are also known as "phoenix worms".

The reason why Shengshen Environment breeds black water fly is also to see its value, but the mechanism of black water fly is not clear, which is also the blind area of black water fly farmers.

In this regard, Huang Yongping's team took the lead in the world to carry out the whole gene sequencing and gene function annotation research of the black water fly, and established a gene editing platform based on CRISPR/Cas9 black water fly early embryo, which provided a theoretical and technical basis for the research and commercial breeding of the functional genome of the black water fly.

"At present, the directional transformation of the individual size, eye color and wing development of the black water fly larvae has been realized, and the variety with faster growth and development speed and higher transformation efficiency is being developed using the platform developed in the early stage." Huang Yongping said.

On this basis, Huang Yongping's team designed a technical solution that can directly feed the larvae of black water fly larvae with a moisture content of 65% to 90% of the kitchen waste without any pretreatment processes such as dehydration, degreasing, and homogenization, and the subsequent biotransformation process does not require any manual or mechanical operation.

"After 8 to 10 days of treatment, the kitchen waste is converted into insect feed, which is very popular in the market, and on the other hand, into insect manure that can be used as a raw material for organic fertilizer." Huang Yongping said.

Gradually, Huang Yongping's team also found out the parameters and technical conditions of each link in the resource treatment process of black water fly waste suitable for the urban treatment system, including wet garbage storage and storage conditions, larval inoculation, insect seedling incubation technology, suitable transformation environmental conditions, etc., laying the foundation for the standardization, intensification and modularization of the system.

Process system embodies "precision" everywhere

One of the things that worries Tang Bin is that after the wet garbage is recovered, it is necessary to pretreat the recycled garbage with centrifugation, layering, dehydration and homogenization according to the traditional method, which is an important reason for the high cost. Another challenge arises, according to the increasingly stringent environmental requirements, what about the discharge of wastewater after pretreatment?

The problems that Tang Bin encountered became simple here in Huang Yongping.

Huang Yongping's team took the lead in using standardized and modular boxes to biotransform black water fly waste. That is, 30 tons of wet garbage are processed daily as a module for design, and a total of 2500 square meters of buildings are planned to be built. Among them, the black water fly conversion constant temperature workshop is 1000 square meters, the insect breeding constant temperature workshop is 400 square meters, the wet garbage can storage and garbage fermentation workshop is 400 square meters, the product processing workshop is 500 square meters, and the warehouse is 200 square meters.

This is the process system of the black water fly biotransformation wet waste technology scheme explored and established, including the wet waste collection and transportation system, the wet waste dumping system, the biotransformation system, the product processing system, the lactic acid bacteria expansion system, the waste gas treatment system, and the breeding system.

"We have systematically and quantitatively explored each process link, and formulated the most suitable parameter indicators and related evaluation indicators." Huang Yongping told China Science Daily.

For example, in the incubation process of black water fly seedlings, the insect seedlings are accurately quantified, and the parameters of the subsequent inoculation insect seedlings and excipients are completely matched, and the one-time feeding method is adopted to reduce the operation link; the kitchen waste is pretreated by lactic acid bacteria and yeast mixture for 1 to 30 days, which can reduce the pH value of the kitchen waste, effectively control the kitchen waste storage process and the odor gas emission in the process of black water fly taking the kitchen waste, and make it easier for the black water fly larvae to ingest the nutrients in the kitchen waste.

In response to Tang Bin's concern about the problem of wastewater discharge after pretreatment of wet garbage, Huang Yongping's team ensured the cycle of kitchen waste treatment through accurate quantification of the number of insect seedlings, and controlled the moisture content of the final kitchen waste and excipient mixture through accurate quantification of excipient additions, making it more suitable for black water flies to eat, while avoiding the discharge of wastewater in the garbage.

"This systematic and standardized process can reduce the cost of using black water fly to treat food waste and improve the efficiency of black water fly conversion into kitchen waste." Huang Yongping said that through this overall process supporting scheme, they improved the ability of black water fly to convert kitchen waste into its own biomass, and realized the resource utilization of kitchen waste.

It is reported that the set of technical process schemes has been landed in the shengshen environment and has achieved the expected results.

Settle the account for the return on investment

Adult mating link 1.5 million yuan, breeding insect incubation link 1.5 million yuan, large-scale mechanical link 3.2 million yuan, automation link 3.8 million yuan, infrastructure construction costs of 5 million yuan, Tang Bin and Huang Yongping to build an average of 30 tons of wet waste per day demonstration test base as the standard, estimated the fixed asset investment of 15 million yuan, and combined with the parameter indicators and related evaluation indicators, conducted a return on investment assessment.

In the end, the team calculated by processing 10,950 tons of wet waste per year, and estimated that the operating income could reach 11.899 million yuan, and after deducting costs, it could achieve an operating profit of 4.538 million yuan. "It's expected to pay back on the investment in more than three years." Tang Bin told China Science Daily.

In terms of operating income sources, the main sources are black water fly body feed and insect manure. Taking insect body feed as an example, the feed raw material catalogue issued by the former Ministry of Agriculture (now the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs) clearly stipulates that insect powder can be included as a raw material containing lipoprotein, mainly used to replace fishmeal, and there is no production license management requirement.

"The air-dried crude protein of the black water fly body is as high as 40%, and the crude fat reaches 15.94, which is close to domestic fishmeal and close to the content of first-class soybean meal." Huang Yongping said. Therefore, the insect protein produced by black water fly can be sold as feed raw materials. According to statistics, China's protein feed raw materials import volume is the first in the world, and the degree of dependence on foreign countries exceeds 70%. Due to the shrinking international marine fisheries and the current complex international situation, fishmeal is undersupplied and prices are rising.

The body utility of the black water fly does not stop there. Antimicrobial peptides and medium-chain fatty acids are widely present in the larvae of black water fly, and have become a hot research topic in the field of biomedicine in recent years. "If there is a breakthrough in the field of biomedicine, it will bring a broader market prospect to the technology."

The black water fly pre-pupa shell is also a treasure. Huang Yongping introduced that the application of a large amount of chitosan contained in pre-pupae shells has made significant progress in the application of medicine, food, chemicals, cosmetics and many other fields. For patients, the effect of chitosan in lowering blood lipids and blood sugar has been studied. At the same time, chitosan is listed as a thickener and a film agent in the national food additive use standard.

China's annual wet waste is about 160 million tons, livestock and poultry excreta about 3.8 billion tons, plus about 60 million tons of fermentation residues discharged by industrial production, the total is about 4 billion tons. "If 10% of these organic wastes are used, 80 million tons of fresh insects and 100 million tons of high-quality organic fertilizer raw material products can be generated, and then these raw materials are processed at one time, and the total output value reaches the trillion level is not a problem." Huang Yongping told China Science Daily.

However, Huang Yongping's focus is not on how much money he earns. He and his partners hope that through the joint efforts of all of them, all kinds of headache-inducing organic waste will be transformed into new resources.

"Compared with the traditional landfill, incineration, aerobic composting and anaerobic fermentation methods, the use of black water fly larvae to treat kitchen waste has the characteristics of low cost, high conversion efficiency, no secondary pollution and high degree of resource utilization." Huang Yongping said that compared with the biotransforming vectors of lower animals such as earthworms, cockroaches, mealworms and fly maggots, the advantages of black water flies are obvious. On the one hand, the black water fly has stronger adaptability and biotransformation efficiency for the environment with high salt, high oil and high moisture content; on the other hand, it does not carry human or animal pathogenic bacteria, and there is no biosecurity risk.

As for why black water fly does not carry pathogenic bacteria and can also degrade antibiotics, Huang Yongping's team is working with other scientific research institutions to tackle key problems and is committed to the research and industrialization of high value-added products of black water fly body. (Reporter Qin Zhiwei)

Source: China Science Daily