Some of you may know of our tenacious journey to reduce emissions created from food waste in landfills, and our passion for regenerating our soils.
Now in our 4th year collecting and processing kitchen waste in Nelson, we've diverted and upcycled over 300 tonnes of food scraps from landfill into quality, living compost. We have a growing customer base of over 120 ongoing collection contracts and we've built a strong and diverse community around our weekly educational initiative “Compost Club”.
Scaling up this operation is both essential and an enormous challenge. We built our first automated composting machine prototype called bEartha to run Nelson City Council's food waste collection trial in 2020. This was so successful that the Ministry for Environment and Nelson City Council offered us grants to help us further develop our design. 2 years later, after hundreds of hours designing and engineering, bEartha v2 is finally complete.
With the perfect operation site now secured in Nelson CBD, we're ready to build Nelson's first automated food waste composting facility. While bEartha takes care of the bulk of the composting process, we need funds to install her and build the supporting infrastructure needed to run the operation.
The completion of this facility will see us increase our intake capacity by 3 tonnes per week, create 6 part time jobs and a strong foundation for us to continue expanding from.
With your support we will be able to build our first facility without creating a large amount of debt. We have never asked for help like this - but now we need you, your activism and your generosity to get us across the line. Thank you for considering supporting this project.
bEartha is our in-vessel composting machine designed and built right here in Nelson, New Zealand. The primary purpose of bEartha is to make our hot composting process more automated and efficient. bEartha does this by continuously monitoring the compost temperature with sensors, and automating the turning of the compost with an electric motor and mixer when the highest optimal temperature is reached. This re-oxygenates and optimises the conditions for the micro-organisms doing the decomposition.
bEartha also captures the methane produced by the composting process using a biofilter, reducing both emissions and odours. Being contained “in-vessel”, bEartha also eliminates any chance of the compost attracting pests such as rats and mice. These features make her a great solution for composting in the same urban environments that the kitchen waste is collected from, reducing transportation requirements. Being modular, bEartha facilities can scale to any demand, then localised and distributed as required.
bEartha is unique among similar machines in many ways - for example, she responds dynamically to temperature conditions rather than just running on a scheduled timer, although she can do that too. We've also built an app to monitor and control bEartha remotely, and analyse and act on insights available from extensive data reporting. We're also continually working to make bEartha as affordable as possible and plan on open sourcing the designs and code in the future to help achieve this.
Out of necessity to scale our composting operations and very little financial resources, we built bEartha v1 in 2019 on a shoestring budget, from a 25 year old 20,000 litre steel tank reclaimed from a vineyard. We pieced together second hand motors and other bits of hardware, largely with the time and skill sets we had available in our immediate community - Ben Bushell had applicable experience and knowledge in manufacturing, Matt Clements was completing his apprenticeship as an industrial electrician, Shea Dawson had applicable skills in software development and Cristian Ciente, a retired electrical engineer with a lifetime of great experience took us under his wings.
We learned a lot from this process and pushed the limits of what we could achieve by ourselves to the absolute edge.
We are extremely grateful to have received grants to build bEartha 2, which afforded us the opportunity to contract out the heavy engineering work to the experts. After a long process trying to find a contractor that was up to the task, we were very happy to partner with Kernohan Engineering who have helped us dramatically improve bEartha from design through to build.
As a result, bEartha's design has had a complete overhaul. bEartha 2 is now fully contained inside a shipping container which makes her very safe to work around and extremely portable.
Our software and electrical systems have been radically upgraded from bEartha 1's DIY microcontroller and PCB prototype board to a rock solid set of industrial grade controller, sensor and networking components, including a PLC running a full Linux OS. This gives us the opportunity to run more complex software while also guaranteeing a high level of safety and reliability.
If you watched the video above, you would have seen how much labour was required to load bEartha v1 by hand. This is a major bottleneck in our current operations. An enclosed auger/feeder that carries food waste from our shredder unit directly into bEartha will radically improve efficiency and reduce the amount of exposure the team has to raw food waste, which let's face it - is not the most pleasant material to be working with for hours on end! We have had an epic auger manufactured, we now just need to pay for it to be connected to bEartha and adapt our shredder to feed it.
Cost: $18,000.00
bEartha requires a 3-phase power supply installed at our new site, to run her electric motor, the shredder motor, and the extractor fan motor. This has turned out to be fairly expensive due to the installation requiring us to cut into asbestos around the current power board, and run the 3 phase cable 20 metres from the mains board through the building, and 25 metres underground across the yard.
There are also extra costs involved in ensuring our installation satisfies regulatory requirements.
Cost: $9,000.00
One of the biggest challenges we had running bEartha 1 was working outside in all weather conditions.
There are many tasks for the team to complete: we open the collected bins of food waste, sort for contaminants, run the food waste through a shredder, load it into the machine and wash the emptied collection buckets, all of which we have been doing in the open and under flood lights during the winter.
Whilst Nelson has great weather, we need the security of a protected space.
A cost effective solution for our new facility is a 12m x 6m marquee so that we can perform the above tasks in an enclosed environment. The marquee will be customised to connect with bEartha’s feed auger, and fan unit to extract odours for those working inside.
Cost: $3,000.00
If you’ve ever been to the Compost Club on a Saturday morning, you’ll know that washing up is almost half of our work. With our new facility designed to process the waste streams from 400 businesses and homes, we need to optimise this critical process for safety and efficiency.
Cost: $6,000.00
We're allocating around 10% of this project's budget to cover any unforseen costs that inevitably arise in complex project like this.
Cost: $4,000.00
Givealittle charges a 5% fee on all contributions to our campaign. If our campaign is successful, we would incur around $2,000 worth of fees.
Cost: $2,000.00
Launch Crowdfunding campaign on givealittle
Site prepared for bEartha delivery
bEartha, auger and shredder delivered to site
Enclosed processing area installed
bEartha painted and branding/logos installed (community working bee)
CANCELLED
Electrical installation completed
Crowdfunding campaign closes
Washing up station, toilet, plumbing installed
Facility launched
To meet our milestone goals, we are dependent on circumstances aligning for multiple 3rd parties to complete tasks on time. We need the site landlord to move his shipping containers, we need the engineers to have availability to deliver bEartha from the workshop, and various contractors like Lift and Shift, electricians and plumbers to fit with our schedule, too.
We’ve done everything we can to orchestrate all of this but also recognise that we are depending on others whose capacities are likely impacted to some degree by covid and flood affected supply chains and services. Any delays or changes to our timing will be announced in our weekly updates to those who contributed to this campaign.
While we’ve done our best to accurately budget for this project, our experience is that unexpected costs are… to be expected. We currently have a private loan which we are using to fund much of this project’s expenses up front. If we raise our goal of $42k through this campaign, we can have everything paid for and be clear of debt. In the case of extra costs and/or falling short of our fundraising goals, we will extend the loan to complete the project. With interest rates on the rise we would really like to avoid that, so thank you again for any support you can offer.
Wow, you made it to the end!
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If you have any questions or would like to get in touch please contact info@communitycompost.co.nz
www.communitycompost.co.nz
Last updated 28/09/22 12:45pm