Dutch companies set up giant bread bins to help cities tackle rat scourge

Businesses in Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam are getting involved in efforts to collect waste bread and turn it into biogas and fertiliser

Once upon a time, you would throw your old bread to the birds. But in the Netherlands, where an excess of crumbs is feeding a growing scourge of rats, people are starting to turn to massive bread bins instead.

Rather than ending up in the street or the dump, collected bread waste is taken to anaerobic digesters and turned into biogas or made into fertiliser.