I e-mailed the authors of the guide to alert them to our questions. Today I recieved the following reply from Bram Dortmans:

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Dear Elisabeth,

Sorry for the late reply. Yes in the publication we are focusing on municipal organic solid waste (restaurant waste, market waste and household waste). Feacal sludge would certainly need post-processing and I doubt if the larvae could end up in food or feed products in any condition after having fed on human waste.

I hope this helps.

Kind regards,

Bram

Thank you for sharing this Chris - it's very interesting!

I'd like to know more about the steps taken to make sure that the BSF don't become a disease vector, especially if they're fed with human feces. I've read that BSF are effective in decreasing the count of e. coli, and even salmonella, and I noted in the manual that boiling the larvae is recommended, but do you have any additional information documenting the effectiveness of this treatment? If not, is there an additional treatment step you'd recommend taking?

Thank you!

Dear Chris,

Thanks for posting this publication. One thing is not clear to me: is the guide assuming that only biowaste without fecal matter is processed or not?
I am asking because on page 16 you list faecal sludge as a suitable biowaste for BSF treatment:

Table 1: Different types of biowaste found suitable for BSF treatment
· Municipal organic waste
· Food and restaurant waste
· Market waste
· Food processing waste
· Spent grains
· Slaughterhouse waste
· Poultry manure
· Pig manure
· Human faeces
· Faecal sludge

But in the rest of the document when I look for aspects of pathogen reduction or risk management with regards to pathogens I find nothing. Or maybe I didn't look for the right keywords? Or is it because the guide only looks at processing but not really at the quality of the end product and its marketing?

When reviewing the discussion threads in the BSF category here on the forum so far, I had formed the opinion that treating non-faecal biowaste with BSF is relatively easy in terms of regulations; but treating faeces-derived biowaste is a completely different story (and e.g. not possibly if the produced animal food is supposed to be marketed in the European Union).
Am I right with this perception or not?

Regards,
Elisabeth

Sandec/Eawag is glad to announce the publication of: Step-by-Step Guide for Black Soldier Fly Biowaste Processing.
This guide has been prepared for practical use, explaining the required materials and equipment, as well as each working step similar to a cookbook with its respective recipes. It includes all information necessary to develop and operate a BSF waste processing facility for medium sized commercial operation (input: 10-20 tons of waste per week; output: 500-1,000 kg dried larvae per week).
The approach presented in this handbook is one among many. It is based on the experience of our pilot facility in Indonesia and can be put into place with locally available equipment and without automatization. The operations presented here have proven to work in practice, but selected steps may individually be replaced with other procedures depending on the given context or experience.

The guide is available free for download on our homepage and comes together with a descriptive video. www.eawag.ch/en/department/sandec/projec...biowaste-processing/

For more detailled discussion on BSF, you can also join Facebook at www.facebook.com/BSFhandling/

regards
Chris