Alternative Proteins Magazine ISSUE FOCUS 44 October 2025 claim to make insect farming really circular: Allowing “true” waste streams to be fed to insects, and better valorising a by-product of insect protein production, “frass”, as a fertiliser (Figure 1). CAN INSECTS AS ANIMAL FEED BRING SUSTAINABILITY BENEFITS? It is unquestionable that food waste is a key concern of our food systems, with one quarter of the food produced for human consumption being wasted. It would however be foolish to think that all of it can be upcycled through insect farming, without compromising on food safety, costs, and animal welfare. It would make little sense for insects to be fed the meat and fish co-products that are already used directly as pet food, given to farm animals, or utilised for composting or in other economic sectors. Incidentally, the properties that make a substrate useful or desirable for insect production are often the same that make them useful or desirable for other industries (Roffeis et al., 2020). A 2025 study of waste-to-nutrition pathways in France highlighted the limits of feeding waste to insects and concluded that feeding livestock with suitable organic waste was actually much more efficient to reduce the environmental impact of food systems (Javourez et al., 2025). The most comprehensive life cycle analysis of insect protein production, commissioned by the UK government, compared insect meal from grain-fed, manure-fed, and waste-fed insects against soybean and fishmeal (see Figure 2). It found the climate impact of waste-fed insects to still be 1.8 times higher than fishmeal, and 5.7 times higher than soybean (and performing worse than soybean on 15 environmental metrics out of 16). Even fed with waste, insect feed would still be worse for the environment than what the industry seeks to replace at the moment. 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 Wheat-fed Insect Meal Climate change, total (kg CO2 eq. / kg protein) 30,1 15,9 12,9 7,15 2,23 Manure-fed Insect Meal Waste-fed Insect Meal Fish Meal Soybean Meal Figure 2. Climate change impact of insect meal, fish meal and soybean meal Data from Ricardo Ltd., “Life Cycle Assessment of UK Insect Protein Production Processes for Pig and Poultry Feed” (2024) Competitiveness Animal welfare Food safety Feasability Sustainability Chart by Eurogroup for Animals Figure 1
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