Singaporean start-up turns food waste into coveted materials

KUCHING (July 27): With the rise of urbanism and consumerism, we have been left with yet another sustainability issue to address – how to deal with the rapidly increasing amounts of food waste generated by our populations.

In the past, the most common way of dealing with food waste would have been to send it off to landfills where it would naturally decompose back into the earth.

However, with increasing amounts of food waste, these landfills have begun turning into rotting mountains of organic material that do untold damage to their surrounding environments, polluting water and soil, harbouring harmful pests and bacteria and emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) like methane.

An alternative to this would be to naturally compost food waste into valuable fertiliser for agriculture purposes.

However, this time consuming method requires large swathes of land and may not be viable for city-states like Singapore that lack the land for composting facilities and or landfills.

In Singapore’s case, waste disposal has long been a rather straight forward affair.

Gathered and sent to its four waste-to-power plants, Singapore’s waste is incinerated at 1,000 Celsius with the steam emitted converted to electricity through turbine generators, the toxic fumes filtered and scrubbed before releasing back into the air, and the resulting ash collected and sent to its only landfill, Semakau landfill, where it is used for land reclamation works.

Overall, this seems like an ideal solution for Singapore’s waste management but for Insectta founders, Chua Kai-Ning and Phua Jun Wei, it wasn’t a sustainable option nor was it a viable option that could be adopted around the world.

According to Chua, the incineration of organic waste such as food waste can be incredibly energy inefficient due to its high moisture content; and with Singapore generating about 813,000 tonnes of food waste annually or around 137kg per capita, this waste incineration solution may end up not being all that sustainable in the long run.

Black soldier flies the champion of the circular economy

So what can we do other than landfills, composting and incineration?

Chua and Phua had founded Insectta back in 2017 with the intention of tackling food waste through the use of black soldier flies (BSF) which were then hailed as the rising stars of the global circular economy due to their incredible ability in converting organic waste into valuable biomass that is rich in proteins and fats.

Explaining BSFs nature and role in organic waste disposal, Chua guided that the insects have four different life stages, the egg, the larvae, the pupae and the adult.

“BSF’s larvae stage is especially interesting to us because it is the only stage in its whole life cycle that actually consumes food and that is what makes it’s the champion of the circular economy.

“It can eat up to four times its body weight in food waste every single day during its larvae stage which is around two weeks and the waste it produces called ‘frass’ during this time can be used as organic fertiliser for crops.

“The larvae are also chockful of proteins and oils, making it ideal to be utilised as animal feed, or they can be processed and further segmented into protein and oil for various other uses,” Chua shared.

After its larvae stage, the BSFs then turn into pupae before emerging as adults where it does not bite, sting or eat and has a singular purpose to mate and lay eggs before the end of its life cycle.

Chua added that BSFs are also not known disease vectors and do not pose much of a threat as invasive species as they are native all around the world, including in Southeast Asia.

Wanting to capitalise on BSFs incredible powers and minimal downsides, the duo became one of the first BSF players in Singapore and aimed to convert local food waste into agriculture fertilisers and animal feed.

Creative pivot from BSF producer to biomaterial manufacturer

While the applications of BSF seemed to be endless, Chua and Phua began encountering roadblocks early on in their journey as they realised that the BSF industry possessed very slim margins with heavy competition.

And for Insectta, the competition was especially fierce as they found themselves struggling to compete with other players in surrounding countries like Malaysia and Indonesia who had no shortage to access to land and labour to set up hyper-farms and scale up production.

“We realised we could compete against Malaysia and Indonesia, even if we make the biggest and fattest Singaporean farm, we cannot compete.

“So we had two options, either we leave Singapore to also set up hyper-farms or we pivot our business model,” Chua shared.

In the end, Insectta chose to pivot their business model by focusing on deriving precious biomaterials from other parts of BSF life cycle that are underutilised.

Specifically, Chua and Phua targeted the spent pupae shells of the BSF which were largely regarded as waste and or treated as fillers for animal feed and fertilisers.

Rich in chitin, the duo aimed to extract chitosan from the BSF pupal shells as the popular chemical compound is widely sought after by various industries due to its numerous commercial and biomedical uses.

Most famously known as a popular ‘fat blocker’ supplement back in the early 2000s, Chua guided that the current chitosan industry is booming as the moisturising and antimicrobial chemical compound is already being used in medicine, bandages, skin care, food and beverages , wastewater treatment, agriculture, and even the automotive paint.

That said, the current supply chain for chitosan is already well developed with the shells of crustaceans as the primary source.

Nevertheless, Insectta believes that there is still plenty of room in the chitosan industry for BSF derived chitosan as their chitosan possess the advantage of increased purity over crustacean derived chitosan.

According to Phua, the main issue with crustacean derived chitosan is that it tends to have higher levels of heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic present.

“Heavy metals in bodies of water can accumulate in crustacean shells where the chitin is, and this is true even for farmed shrimp as there are a lot of agricultural runoff into ponds and mangroves.

“This becomes a big problem when you want to use chitosan for certain applications, and you can even find many companies declaring a limited of 40 parts of million (ppm) of heavy metals for their medical grade chitosan,” Phua said.

He explained that a heavy metal impurity rate of 40ppm is considered very high, and in contrast, Insectta’s own produced Chitosan only had levels of 0.2 ppm.

“There are two reasons why we don’t find heavy metals in our chitosan, the first reason is source as the farms we source pupae shells from provide clean diets for their BSF as they are exporting to countries like the EU which have strict regulations on food and material safety.

“The second reason is because BSFs live in controlled and sanitary environments.”

Insectta strikes ‘black gold’ during R&D

Renewed with a new business direction, Chua and Phua started R&D into their chitosan extraction during 2020 to 2022 and unexpectedly struck ‘black gold’ during the process.

While they were in the process of removing proteins out of the BSF pupae shells, they noticed that the colour of the colour of the resulting liquid was very dark.

“In nature, there are many different types of pigment, but the pigment that makes things black in nature is often melanin, which is the pigment that makes our hair, skin and irises colour.

“We wondered if this was melanin and it turned out that we were correct,” Phua shared.

For Insectta, the discovery of melanin in the BSF pupae shells was a turning point as the pigment had very high-value applications in both biomedical and biotech industries such as cancer diagnostics and therapy, bone and nerve regenerative scaffolds, hybrid supercapacitors and wearable electronics.

The pigment is hailed as the ‘black gold’ of the biomaterials world with recent market prices averaging at around US$800 per gram.

Developing a proprietary extraction method, Insectta became the first player to produce unprecedented amounts of melanin that is also highly functional due to its water-soluble properties enabling it to be used in biomedical applications.

“We are hopeful that this will power the commercialisation of melanin’s applications in the future,” Chua said.

Phua added that while the discovery was made thanks to their drive to constantly find more ways that they can add value into the BSF industry, it was also a necessary one.

“Melanin has anti-microbial properties so in the end if we do not extract this melanin, it becomes part of the wastewater and when discharged into the ocean or other bodies of water, it can kill a lot of bacterial, viruses and fungi that are native to the ocean.

“This would disrupt our ecosystem so in the end we need to find a way to make sure everything is clean and sustainable,” he shared.

Main challenges in commercialisation

When asked what the main challenges in commercialising their operations were, Phua shared that one main concern Insectta faces is the bad reputation that insects have in the wider public.

“One of the biggest challenges we face is consumer acceptance because even we provide chemical analysis that prove our biomaterials are of higher quality, there is still an emotional barrier from buyers regarding the role insects play in our production,” he lamented.

He pointed out that insects already play a vital role in our daily lives as not only pollinators but also producers of consumable materials like honey, shellac and pigments.

“So in the end, it’s a PR problem as the insect industry is just so nascent but hopefully with a new subset of communications coming out within our industry, we may soon see insects in a new light.”

Insectta was part of one of the organisations involved in Singapore International Foundation’s (SIF) “Driving towards a Sustainable and Resilient Singapore” Visiting Journalist Programme from June 3 to 6 in Singapore.