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Every time I pass the local community garden I think of Ann Patchett’s “I am a compost heap.”
I feel like the signs on the compost heap could stand in for various stages of the creative process.
I started composting a couple of years ago using two bins in my yard. Ever since then, I’ve dutifully collected fruit and veggie scraps, egg shells, and coffee grounds, alternating these “greens” with layers of “browns” — dead leaves from the oak trees in our yard. This spring I will harvest my first batch of compost and I don’t know if it’s possible to be more excited about moist mulch. That’s why Clio Chang’s Curbed story caught my eye. I’ve always wondered what happens in the industrial composting process and Chang’s piece does a terrific job going behind the scenes of a compost collection service that begins under the cover of darkness in Queens, New York.
This is the sorting phase of the process, and no fewer than six Waste Management employees have been assembled to take me around. First, we watch as the trucks line up to be weighed, since customers pay by weight to dump. “Is it priced by pound?” I ask. “Tons,” everyone responds in unison, and we all laugh at my inability to grasp orders of magnitude. One-third of the residential trash — some 4,000 tons daily — that New Yorkers throw away is food or yard waste that could be diverted from methane-emitting landfills. The heap of food scraps we are looking at, which has cartoon-like steam rising off the top, is massive, but only constitutes a tiny fraction of what it could be. There are pigeons resting and scavenging on its peak. Darryll Persad, the site manager, tells me that they have an air-filtration system and a deodorizer that puts out a scent to help control the odor. There are multiple scents to choose from, but Persad says, with a decisiveness that I can only dream of, that he “just orders cinnamon.” (Since all I smell is trash, I’ll just have to take his word for it.)
Here’s a clever new bit of kitchen tech. Victoria, BC firm Sepura recently introduced its eponymous home appliance, which sits under a sink in place of a garbage disposal. There’s an included Bluetooth button, which can be stuck anywhere near the sink. The system itself sits underneath the sink and is designed to hook directly into the drainage.
When enough foodstuffs have accrued beneath the drain, tap the button, and it will initiate a process that effectively shoves the waste products into the appliance. In an introductory video, co-founder and CEO Victor Nicolov is quick to note that the system doesn’t actually grind the food waste, unlike a traditional garbage disposal. “We found it was better to keep things [intact]. We found it was better for our planet to avoid crushing things into our drains.”
The system also has a safeguard to stop water from entering the receptacle, allowing it to drain out of the pipe first. It will also stop if it detects something like a utensil, which you don’t want in the composting bucket.
Today, the firm announced the close of a $3.7 million seed round designed to accelerate production and delivery of its product, which will run $700 when it starts shipping in July. The round was led, appropriately, by sink-maker Blanco.
Image Credits: Sepura Home
“Sepura represents a significant step forward in sustainable living. With its advanced technology and user-friendly design, Sepura offers a simple and effective way to minimize waste and promote a cleaner, healthier environment,” Nicolov says in a release. “We are excited to bring consumers the sustainable solution they are seeking and work to improve how food waste impacts the environment moving forward.”
The company claims that its system can “effectively separate 99.9% of solid waste that goes down the drain.”
Sepura Home raises $3.7 million to make your kitchen sink a composter by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
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