Turn Your Kitchen Scraps Into Compost With This Food Recycler

Imagine never having to waste even the tiniest bit of food anymore. No matter how well you plan your meals or efficient you are at cooking, there will always be food scraps in your kitchen, be it from cutting veggies or bits of leftovers. Unless you live in one of the few green-minded cities offering curbside pickup for food waste and municipal composting, there still isn’t really a good alternative to having a compost pile in your backyard (which you can forget about if you live in an apartment.

At least until now. The Zera Food Recycler, developed by home-appliance manufacturer Whirlpool, fits seamlessly into even the smallest kitchen and lets you turn a week’s worth of food scraps into nutrient-rich fertilizer that you can use to grow your indoor garden. Once a week, users place an additive pack consisting of coconut husk fibers and baking soda into the bin, and keep adding food scraps over the course of the week.

When Zera is filled up with your food waste a simple push of a button will activate the decomposition process, which is cut down to only 24 hours by a smart combination of oxygen, moisture, heat, and constant mixing. Zera can even break down dairy products and meat (no bones), which typically can’t be composted in a standard backyard compost pile.

At a current price of $999 on Indigogo, Zera doesn’t come cheap, but the funding campaign has already succeeded its goal by several hundred percent, proving that there are lots of people interested in an easy-to-use solution for sending less food to the landfill and making our lives a little bit greener.