THE PLIGHT OF THE PIG IN THE NANNY STATE - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 58

Five years later most of the waste is still landfilled or incinerated, and the most profitable
recycling strategy has so far come from car owners making biofuel from the sudden surplus
of used chip oil. However, in February 2008, DEFRA announced £10 million funding for
an anaerobic digestion plant to process waste into energy and compost. WRAP calculates
that if the 5.5 million tonnes of organic waste were anaerobically digested 'between 477
and 761 gigawatts hours per year of electricity would be generated - enough to meet the
needs of up to 164,000 houses.'
This is somewhat underwhelming. WRAP are proposing to take waste equivalent to half
the food necessary to feed a nation of 60 million people and burn its energy content to
provide electricity for between 260,000 and 420,000 people. At 10 p per kilowatt hour,
that's worth between £48 and £76 million.
The alternative of feeding the waste to pigs would provide at the very least 230,000
tonnes of pork per year with a retail value over £1 billion, based on a 24:1 conversion
ratio achieved in a plant in Cuba in the 1990s. 22 That's the equivalent in calories of all the
food required to feed 800,000 people. To produce the same amount of pork from cereal-fed
pigs would require over a million tonnes of grain, enough to feed more than three million
people. And this is only the post consumer waste. If Lord Haskins' 20 million tonnes were
fed to pigs that would produce at least 800,000 tonnes of pork, more than one sixth of our
entire meat consumption. And at the tail end of the whole process you can still extract some
energy by anaerobically digesting the manure.
Around the time that these estimates were first published in The Land magazine, Tris-
tram Stuart carried out an independent calculation based on figures provided by the Green-
finch anaerobic digestion plant, which currently generates 255 kwh of electricity per tonne
of food waste, and could also provide hot water equivalent to another 76 kwh, with a po-
tential value of £37.50. Stuart adopted a 15:1 waste to meat conversion ratio, based on his
first hand experience of food waste processing plants in the Far East, which means that the
pork derived from a tonne of waste food would be worth £330 - nine times as much. The
CO 2 savings from food waste would also be nearly twice as great, and closer to 100 times
as great if you included deforestation emissions caused by feeding soya to pigs. 23
Of course, it would be even more efficient if we wasted less food. But there will always
be a fair amount of waste and the figures reaffirm what is common sense - that keeping
food in the food chain is more sensible than burning it.
Fortunately the British animal-hygiene neurosis hasn't yet spread to the rest of the world.
Over half the world's pork is now raised in China, much of it in peasant households and
small farms. A 1998 US study of Chinese agriculture noted: 'With the dissolution of many
collective farms and the institution of the Household Responsibility System in the early
1980s, backyard [pork] production increased to 92.9 per cent by 1982.' 24 The advantage of
decentralizing pig production is that it is easy to find waste food locally, easy to dispose