(note: today’s idea is derived from my longer essay about organic waste management. For more context, check out the full story here).
Even though food and paper waste accounts for nearly half of our landfill space, there are no commercially suitable composting options on the market today. To be marketable, such a system would need to be affordable, manageable and efficient. The best idea I can think of would essentially be NatureMill-on-steroids.
But would restaurants really install a device that would be large enough to deal with their organic waste? Let’s consider the economic benefits of doing so:
1. Significantly reduced waste management costs (they would no longer be trucking away organic refuse).
2. Free power: NatureMill uses very little electricity at the residential level. Boston is producing electricity at the industrial level. Could a commercial system prove to be profitable too? Could it be plugged into their energy grid, and reverse metered?
3. Compost sales to local greenhouses and garden supply centers would produce an adjunct revenue stream.
4. Opportunity for carbon credits from methane capture. Some estimates project this to be a multi-trillion dollar market. Indeed, there are equipment manufacturers in the agricultural space who are giving away their equipment in order to buy up opportunities for carbon credits usage rights. That’s a different market (generally speaking, they aren’t making any more farms, and dairies in particular are huge methane producers so they are being aggressively targeted) but the far-sighted will see this is an emerging opportunity nonetheless.
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