Indoor composting robot reduces urban food waste

If a robot owner doesn’t have a garden, the compost is used elsewhere

Spotted: Many towns, villages, and cities don’t have the infrastructure in place to manage a community-wide composting system. Food therefore continues to end up in landfill, especially in areas where room for gardening is scarce. Hungarian startup Compocity’s solution is to bring composting indoors with a smart system called the CompoBot.

The CompoBot gives apartment dwellers with zero access to outdoor space the opportunity to turn food waste into valuable additives for the soil. It also works for businesses and large organisations seeking to reduce their carbon footprints.

The system works at room temperature and without odour. After waste is added to the robot, it is compressed and mixed with a proprietary nutrient solution. Weight and composition details are recorded in the cloud.

An accompanying app includes games, quests, and personalised characters that help make composting a fun and regular part of day-to-day life, at home, in the office, and at school. For households that cannot make use of the fertiliser, Compocity picks it up and delivers it locally to organisations with large growing spaces.

Making cities healthier through improved sustainability practices is something Springwise has spotted in a variety of guises, from bus stops redesigned to attract bees and other wildlife, to a plant-covered school in one of the world’s most polluted urban areas.