Food Recycling Business Reduction of Waste Disposal and Disposal Costs by Achieving a Recycle Community
Recently, reduction of food loss and doing so by promoting food recycling has been garnering worldwide attention. To resolve this issue, NTT Fieldtechno, a member of the NTT West Group, formed an alliance with Well Create Co., Ltd. to offer a "local food resource recycling solution."
"Local food resource recycling solution" is a food fermentation decomposition machine subscription service for markets and food-related businesses which does not require any initial investment. This solution helps to achieve recycling of food resources within the local community by installing the machine at the user's office, decomposing food residues into a fermentation bed (primary fermentation product), providing a part of the collected primary fermentation product to farm producers, recycling into completely mature compost and soil conditioners after going through secondary and tertiary fermentation, and supplying them to farm producers to enable recycling of fresh produce and the like. Information and communication technologies such as IoT are being employed in the process of composting food residues that are generated to enable efficient transport and collection of food residues and enhancement of the quality. Reducing both food residues and disposal cost and offering compost to farmers to help them grow vegetables also contributes to achieving a recycle community and invigoration of the local economy.
Results also showed that the cost for disposal of food residues, which used to be 54 million yen per year for incinerating 12 million tons of food wastes that were being generated, was reduced significantly to 28.8 million yen with the adoption of the local food resource recycling solution (in the case of a particular local wholesale market). Some of the clients who have introduced the solution commented that the food recycling solution has helped to reduce their cost by 20 to 30% and that they were able to grow tasty vegetables with the use of the primary fermentation products.
For this project, NTT West Group plays the role of enhancing efficiency in the operation of the series of services, such as by making use of cloud and IoT devices to allow real-time access to information via the Internet from smartphone or tablet devices, such as the amount of food residues and state of fermentation. By further promoting the food recycling business and invigorating the local economy, NTT West Group will continue to engage in efforts to resolve food loss and other global issues.
