INTERNATIONAL: It's time to take out the trash for Dewi Sinta, and she empties a colourful plate of papaya skins, rotting lettuce and dragonfruit scraps into a green tub in the backyard of her Jakarta home.Inside the tub, tens of thousands of squirming white maggots slither over to devour the golden morsels of food waste.
It may appear to be a revolting sight for some, but for Sinta and her family, the box of maggots, or "Magobox", offers an important solution to two everyday problems: food waste and organic compost for Sinta's garden.
"Before we had maggots, we clumped all of our trash together, regardless of whether it's organic or non-organic, and dumped it altogether. But since we got these maggots, we started to separate our food waste and keep it for the maggots," said Sinta, who heard about the Magobox from an ad on social media.
Sinta and her family have been using the Magobox for the past few months, and receive new deliveries of maggot eggs every few weeks. After the maggots devour food waste, Sinta takes the valuable maggot excrement from the Magobox and sprinkles it onto her plants to use as organic compost. When a batch of maggots reach the pupa stage after at least two weeks, she sells the pupas off to local business owners to use as livestock feed.
Magobox was conceptualised by 28-year-old Indonesian entrepreneur Fathimah Himmatina at the end of 2020, and she only started selling the boxes in February of this year. She came up with the idea for Magobox while researching ways to earn extra income.
"Education about maggots is still lacking among people in Indonesia, because when people see maggots they think of them as gross and there's this stigma that 'maggots eat trash, aren't they dangerous for my livestock'," shared Fathimah
Magobox uses only Black Soldier Fly maggots, since they prefer to consume organic waste, and are rich in protein and calcium content. In Indonesia, Black Soldier Fly maggots are mostly used as livestock feed that is produced on an industrial scale, but rarely are they used to devour food waste for individual households.
According to Fathimah, she was surprised that demand has spiked only after a few months, and so far Magobox has sold over 500 boxes to cities across Indonesia and even Malaysia.Magobox currently orders its Black Soldier Fly maggot supplies from a farm operated by a partner company in Depok of West Java Province, where the Magoboxes are also assembled. The Magobox starter kit is sold for 385,000 rupiah $27 and refills of maggot egg cost 200,000 rupiah, $14 per pack.
Citing data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, The Economist Intelligence Unit's 2018 Food Sustainability index reported that Indonesia produces at least 6 kilogram of food waste per person every year.
