Start of Food Recycling Business
Start of Food Recycling Business
Resolving High-priority Issues Including Food Loss in Japan with ICT
Despite the heavy dependence on imported foodstuffs and production materials, Japan is also facing the problem of "food loss" with large quantities of food intended for consumption being disposed of as wastes. For this reason, it is an urgent task to promote reuse of recyclable food resources and reduce food loss. Reduction of food loss and food recycling are also topics that are garnering worldwide attention.
NTT West Group is now engaging in efforts to tackle this global issue. By utilizing ICT such as the IoT of the Group, NTT Fieldtechno started a food recycling business in April 2019 in collaboration with The Merry Corporation (Fukuoka Prefecture, Kitakyushu City) to offer a "Regional Food Resource Recycling Solution." The initiative aims to enhance the efficiency of the food recycling business (digital transformation: DX) as a step toward resolving high-priority issues such as food loss.
NTT Fieldtechno offers a service that rents out and maintains food residue fermentation decomposition machines for feeding and decomposing food residue to customers in the food industry. Simply by feeding food residue that used to be discarded in the past into the fermentation decomposition machine, it is possible to generate a fermentation bed for decomposition that can be recycled into compost. These fermentation beds are collected periodically and composted at the food recycling center of The Merry Corporation, and compost that is generated is then supplied to contract farmers, agricultural cooperatives and agricultural corporations.
The food residue fermentation decomposition machines that are rented to customers vary in size according to the quantity of food residue to be processed daily. Adopting such a system makes it possible to cut down the cost needed for food waste disposal by 10% to 50%. By utilizing ICT such as IoT to create a recycling community that generates compost from food residue to support vegetable planting by farmers, this initiative also helps to invigorate the local economy.
In addition to further expanding the food recycling business in the subsequent years, NTT Fieldtechno is also accumulating know-how to enhance the efficiency in business operation with the use of tools such as IoT. Not only so, it also plans to work with the other NTT West Group companies as well as local government bodies to conduct verification tests on businesses for supporting the building of a food "recycle loop" in areas that make use of cloud, AI and IoT. Through these efforts, we hope to achieve further popularization of food recycling as well as create new businesses for supporting resource recycling to invigorate the local communities.
[Food Recycling Supply Flow]
[Food resource recycle loop that NTT Fieldtechno aims to create]
