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> The greatest expense seemed to be a team of people picking plastic rubbish out of the incoming waste.

This seems kind of unnecessary? The cockroaches will do the same job. (Well, the inverse job of picking the food out of the inedible trash.)

I guess if you're harvesting the excrement, the trash might get in the way.

Bits of plastic smaller than the maximum diameter of beetle poop are probably not going to be recognized and removed as plastic anyway.

Just shake it all through some progressively finer screens and blow the remaining plastics off the tops of the screens with a blast of air.

Perhaps the plastics would gum up the food-shredder?