Cutting waste with panda poo nets academic Ig Nobel Prize

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Kyodo) A Japanese researcher was among this year's winners of the Ig Nobel Prize on Thursday for developing a method to cut kitchen refuse by using bacteria derived from the feces of giant pandas.

Fumiaki Taguchi, professor emeritus at the graduate school of medical sciences in Kitasato University, shared the prize in the biology category with two Chinese researchers who were graduate students at the university.

Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei were honored for their idea for reducing kitchen waste by more than 90 percent by using panda feces.

Taguchi, 72, attended the awards ceremony for the 19th Ig Nobel Prize, which was held at Harvard University's historic Sanders Theater on Thursday night. The award honors achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.

At the ceremony, Taguchi drew laughs from the audience, saying that while giant pandas are lovable animals, they produce an unimaginably large amount of feces, adding that his research made for an interesting experience.

Taguchi first suspected that giant pandas, which consume large volumes of bamboo, may have peculiar bacteria in their intestines that decompose the leaves and focused his attention on their feces.

The research was then conducted on giant panda feces provided by the Ueno Zoological Gardens in Tokyo, which led to the discovery of bacteria with strong biodegradable properties.

The research method for using the bacteria helped turn, in some cases, more than 95 percent of kitchen refuse into water and carbon dioxide. Research is still under way to put the method into practical use.

The Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded in 10 categories, are given annually by the magazine Annuls of Improbable Research as a humorous version of the Nobel Prizes. It is cosponsored by three organizations affiliated with Harvard University.

The Ig Nobel Peace Prize was given to a group of researchers at the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining, through experiment, whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

The Economics Prize was awarded to the directors, executives and auditors of four Icelandic banks for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa, and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.