If you were asked to rank the animal you’d like to see disappear from the world, how likely would cockroaches be from making your top three?
They’re definitely in mine!
As a southerner in China, I’ve hated cockroaches ever since I was a kid. Cockroaches are prominent and quite big in southern parts of China – they can even fly into your room and your hair!
I almost cry every time I see one.
But a specialized cockroach farming factory in Jinan, Shandong province houses more than a billion of those filthy creatures jumping and flying everywhere!
Why would this facility care raise cockroaches?
For starters, they all have one thing in common — they can eat anything and are never picky about what they do eat.
Li Yanrong, the owner of this cockroach factory, saw an opportunity back when he worked in a pharmaceutical company, at a time when authorities were cracking down on cooking oil and swill.
But with more than 300 people eating at the company restaurant every day, there was no one available to handle such a large amount of garbage every day which soon became a problem for Li Yanrong.
That’s when the idea hit him: since cockroaches love to eat pretty much anything… why not have them eat our kitchen garbage?
He caught a few cockroaches and fed them a variety of leftovers, soon witnessing their eating everything that they had been given.
That’s when Li Yanrong began his new career.
One billion cockroaches can consume an average of 50 tons of kitchen leftovers every day, without any environmental repercussions!
How can they feed so many cockroaches?
Kitchen garbage collected from canteens and other establishments will go through an automatic sorting device, which will then be mixed with glass, stones, and other debris filtered out.
According to Mr. Li’s plan, once his new factory is completed this year, it will be raising up to 4 billion insects, all of which will be able to digest more than 200 tons of kitchen waste a day, a third of the city’s total.
Yes, you read that right… There is more than one cockroach factory.
In order to prevent the cockroaches from “escaping”, almost all factories have been heavily fortified.