The Kitchen Waste Treatment Center in Zhangqiu District, Jinan City, Shandong Province, raises 300 tons of 300 tons of "American cockroaches" and can eat a total of 15 tons of kitchen waste every day. Now, this kind of biological harmless treatment of garbage using "cockroaches eat garbage" has aroused heated discussion.
The use of cockroaches to eat garbage is to let cockroaches act as "scavengers" to help people clean and clean up garbage, and this way seems to be the first time in the world, in the local government cooperation project, to obtain local government land and financial support.
With government support, this should initially be a win-win. In addition to digesting garbage, cockroaches themselves can also be used to produce insect protein feed (1 ton cockroach plus the egg sheath produced by cockroaches can produce 1 ton of insect protein feed, with a protein content of about 72%). In addition, in order to ensure that cockroaches do not escape, it adopts multiple precautions, such as sealing the ventilation holes with steel wire mesh, water spray switches on the walls, underground breeding of insectivorous fish, cockroaches climbing on the wall, will be washed into the pond by the water, swallowed by fish. There is an 85 cm wide ditch around the farm, and the insectivorous fish are also raised in the ditch to prevent cockroaches from escaping. However, the use of cockroaches to digest garbage first requires scientific arguments, the first of which is to consider the effect and efficiency of cockroaches in removing garbage.
Breeding cockroaches to digest garbage is only for kitchen waste, the latter only accounts for a part of people's domestic garbage, and cockroaches can not completely eat kitchen waste, so the later cleaning is also a major problem. After scientific demonstration, there has long been a relatively unanimous opinion on kitchen waste in the world, and the best way is to ferment kitchen waste into methane and reuse it as an organic energy source. At this stage, although the treatment of kitchen waste is not satisfactory, it is mainly that the methods and methods are not very scientific, for example, first of all, garbage classification is not actively promoted and strictly implemented, if garbage classification is done, the existing technology is fully effective, rapid and harmless treatment of kitchen waste.
If cockroaches are used to dispose of food waste, one of the biggest problems is how to control the human and ecological harm caused by the population of cockroaches to reproduce and escape into the environment. Although cockroaches also have a reputation as "scavengers" or "cleaners", they need to be treated with caution because they are pests.
Cockroaches, scientific name cockroaches, are classified among pests as a highly harmful vector organism, and belong to the same category as mosquitoes, flies, fleas, rats, ticks, mites, midges and so on. Cockroaches can carry many pathogenic bacteria, viruses, protozoans, fungi and eggs of parasites and worms, and can serve as an intermediate host for a variety of worms, of which there are more than 40 kinds of bacteria that cause disease to humans alone, such as Mycobacterium leprosy, Shigella dysentery, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhi and so on.
In addition, cockroaches can also carry bacteria that cause cholera, pneumonia, diphtheria, epistaxis, anthrax, tuberculosis and other diseases, once the raised cockroaches escape into the environment, causing large-scale population reproduction, not only will threaten people's health, but also easily cause ecological disasters.
Although there is no international precedent for making cockroaches scavengers, there are other precedents for scientific experiments and research to be demonstrated, such as the introduction of shell langs as scavengers. In the 1960s, when an ecological feces disaster occurred in Australia, the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSRIO) established the Australian Shell Lang Project, which was scientifically demonstrated to introduce 53 species of shell lang from all over the world to treat those diluted feces, thus reducing flies by 90%.
Although this method of introducing foreign shells has worked in Australia, it may not be fully replicated in some other countries, and in scientific arguments, some countries have opposed it, such as New Zealand, which has a similar environment to Australia. Scientists and public health experts believe that the shell can carry and spread germs such as E. coli and Salmonella, which is a great threat to the health of people and animals. Moreover, shell lang may also contaminate household drinking water sources and spread diseases. If a child is playful and swallows a bug carcass, or comes into contact with a shell with a pathogen, it can affect health. At the same time, the shell lang can migrate long distances and can spread disease widely and quickly.
Unable to obtain support from scientific assessments, New Zealand halted the programme. Moreover, Australia's plan to introduce shell lang did not later assess the changes in the population and the impact on the environment, so it cannot be said that the introduction of the shell lang technology was completely successful. Now, to make cockroaches scavengers should also be scientifically demonstrated, but also to realize that cockroaches are pests, and shell lang is not, the breeding and control of cockroaches should be more cautious and careful!