Should we let fly eat our food waste?

Most people tend to avoid food, and the idea of ​​burrs in the trash can is enough to make anyone’s stomach turn.

But a few councils embraced Maggots – more formally known as fly larvae – and the taste of their rotten food.

In Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania in the Baltic Sea, the work of Fly larvae has been formally granted to handle 2700 tons of food waste collected by the city’s 607,000 tons of residents each year and collected with six neighboring councils.

Waste management company Energeman started to mitigate food waste in Vilnius earlier this year and did not actually charge the service for it.

Algirda Blazgys, the company’s CEO, said this is saving New York City as much as 2 million euros (£1.7 million; $2.3 million per year) based on the goal of processing 12,000 tons.

Energeman, along with influential marketing campaigns, has launched new orange food waste bags to residents to encourage more Vilniečiai to separate food waste, as the 2700 tons collected is just a small part of the 40,000 tons of household waste the city is thought to produce.

Last year, the council had to collect food waste, so the city needed to find a solution.

Meanwhile, Energesman plans to turn hypertrophic fly larvae into new income streams.

CEO Algirdas Blazgys said it has about 6 million flies in a special area of ​​the Vilnius factory, which mated about every six hours.

Female flies can lay about 500 eggs over an average of 21 days of life, so Mr. Blazgys and his team deal with more than 3 million larvae a month, consuming more than 11 tons of food waste on the first day of their lives.

The appetite of these tiny organisms makes them excellent candidates for food waste processing. The study showed that a group of people removed 16-inch pizza in just two hours.

The trick is to snatch them before they become mature flies. In this way, protein-rich fly larvae can be converted into protein products for animal feed or industrial use, for example, as ingredients for paints, glues, lampshades and furniture covers.

In addition, their fertilizer is called Frass and can also be used as fertilizer.

Energeman has conducted supply trials with partners in the paint, glue and furniture industries, but Mr Blazgys acknowledged that it proved to be much more complex than he expected.

Sample paint produced using EnergeMan-Rear’s fly larvae did not appear exactly right, but the light created by the lampshade looks promising.

He also established a university partnership to provide fly larvae to conduct research and feed bacteria. Of course, larvae need to be used as bait in the local fishing industry.

However, EU health and safety regulations mean that fly larvae fed with kitchen waste cannot be used in edible insect products because they may be cross-contaminated by meat and fish waste.

“We came up with some crazy ideas and then we started looking for other people who might also come up with some crazy ideas about what we can do,” Mr Blazgys said.

“Since it’s still new, some people are still looking for if we’re going to fail, so they don’t want to brag. But I think we’ll come up with some benefits.”

While there are many cases of fly larvae used in food waste management around the world and harvested as protein components, it is largely commercially based, for example, private contracts between hotel or apartment building owners and fly larvae feeders.

In Kenya, the Mira Project is a social enterprise that uses fly larvae to address the increasing food waste in Mombasa, while also providing fertilizer to local farmers.

However, only a few councils have adopted this way of dealing with food waste.

Australia’s Goterra uses Fly larvae to help Sydney through its food waste, part of a limited trial that began this year.

Over the past three years, Goterra has also cooperated with three townships near the Queanbeyan-Palerang Regional Commission to recycle about 10 tons of food waste.

Whether we will see the UK Council start shipping with millions of flies, so it’s only a matter of time before their larvae produces 6.4 million tons of household food waste here every year.

That’s Larry Kotch’s optimistic view. He is the CEO and co-founder of insect waste management company Flybox, and he says the company operates more insect waste processing locations than any other company in the UK, mainly working with private food manufacturers and supermarkets.

Flybox is also a founding member of the Insect Biotransformation Association, an industry organization representing companies in this field.

Mr Kotch believes that the UK Parliament is of interest, especially since starting in March 2026, England will conduct weekly household food waste collections.

According to the local authorities’ recycling advisory committee, about 148 of the 317 local authorities in England still do not provide this.

However, regulations established by the Department of Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) currently prohibit the Council from using fly larvae to deal with food waste.

If the regulations could match science, Mr Coates believed that “the UK could see insect plants in its first council contract within two years”.

“Unfortunately, it’s always safer for the government… Everyone we talked to in the UK Parliament is very excited about insect protein and would rather work with insect farms than alternative technology.”

Defra confirmed to the BBC that animal by-product regulations limit the use of insects for organic waste streams.

It said there is currently no plan to review the regulations. “Our waste management regulations play a crucial role in protecting the UK’s biosecurity and reducing disease risks,” the spokesperson said.

The current alternative to sending food waste to landfills is anaerobic digestion (AD), a collapse process that produces biogas.

However, Mr Kotch said the current advertising plants are not enough to cope with the expected household food waste.

“Global, more than 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted every year. We believe that up to 40% of this food can be upgraded using insect waste management. Not only does it avoid disposal costs and methane emissions, it also produces valuable protein and organic fertilizers.”