Hungry insect army to chomp through food waste at Howard Smith Wharves

Brisbane will today begin a recycling program that is gathering momentum in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra and has now grabbed the attention of Australian airports too.

On Wednesday morning, a lookalike shipping container filled with black soldier fly larvae will be unveiled at Howard Smith Wharves.

Former farmer Olympia Yarger founded Goterra, the company behind Howard Smith Wharves’ food waste contract.Credit: Nine.

The larvae will be young, virile and – most importantly – hungry.

Their mission each day will be to eat between 1 and 1.7 tonnes of food waste gathered from the precinct’s restaurants and cafes.

Similar to other businesses involving waste-eating insects, the scraps will be turned into fertiliser and pellets of chicken feed.

Howard Smith Wharves is the first Queensland site for Goterra – a Canberra start-up backed by billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes – which has introduced the insects to Barangaroo in Sydney and to Melbourne Airport.

Justin Frank, the company’s head of strategy, said the Brisbane trial was based in a highly modified unit the size of a shipping container.

“Each container can process up to 1.7 tonnes of waste a day, depending on the waste composition,” he said.

The larvae eat the food waste then excrete a substance called frass, which is both a fertiliser and food for stock, mainly chickens.

“They [the larvae] will eat mostly anything, but they can’t have big, dense bones,” Frank said, adding that the company’s Brisbane site was similar to that in Sydney.

“The Lendlease Barangaroo site has multiple restaurants and cafes … so it is similar,” he said. “But there is a lot of coffee at that site, so it is a slightly drier substate.”

The food waste is placed in an organic spinner that turns it into a paste. Robots in the container then feed it to the hungry larvae.

At the end of their 12-day life cycle, the insects are removed and can also be turned into feed or soil conditioners. New larvae are then added to the unit and the process resumes.

Howard Smith Wharves, which approached Goterra after seeing its operation at Barangaroo, already diverts 1500 tonnes of waste from landfill annually through other projects.

“We currently divert 96 per cent of waste from landfill by utilising 17 different waste streams,” chief executive Luke Fraser said.

“By bringing Goterra into our precinct, we are adding another innovative solution to waste streams by harnessing the natural power of insects and transforming waste into fertiliser.”

Larvae will munch through more than a tonne of food waste each day at Howard Smith Wharves.

Methane from food waste comprises 8 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, an issue Goterra founder Olympia Yarger believes is best tackled at a local level.

“Collaborative efforts like this not only address a pressing global issue but also contribute to narrowing the food gap by generating sustainable fertiliser and insect protein,” she said.

Goterra has recently been contracted to turn food waste from 200 Woolworths stores into livestock feed sold to farmers.

“There, we have an offsite, hub model, where their packaged waste comes to us and we put it through a larger-scale process,” Yarger said.

“That [Sydney] site will be commissioned in the not-too-distant future and linked to our Canberra hub.”