Hi everyone,
We’re Team Food-Waste !
As every other team in the CHIC program, we’re all student from different backgrounds and we chose to work on the thematic of the Food-Waste because it’s a cause that we really care about and we think that there’s a lot to do in this domain.
Every year 1.3 billions tons of perfectly eatable food is thrown away around the world (2.3 millions tons only in Switzerland). The value of all this waste reaches an incredible amount of 990 billions dollars and almost half of it is caused by households.
We think we all agree when saying that our planet is in a pretty bad shape so as (pretty) young people we want to do something about it so our children will have a planet to live on (at least until Elon Musk takes us all on Mars).
To do so our team met a few time in the last few weeks to imagine a solution to help households to do with their Food-Waste. It was very stimulating and a lot of different ideas came out of these meetings…
One problem appeared really quick, do we focus our effort on preventing Food-Waste or on dealing with the waste we produce? Since we only have a few months to work on this project and we think that there not much we can do to impact people behaviors with a connected object, we decided to focus on dealing with the waste we all produce.
In order to do so we kept looking for the perfect idea and we came along on one project : a smart composter that allows us to plant and grow aromatic herbs @home! Yes it may sounds a little bit science-fictional, but wait, we’ll explain !
We imagined it as a box (sketch below realized by our very talented designer Dylan) where people can throw their organic waste in with “compost worms” inside that would help decompose the waste without odor, which was the most important pain people told us about. We are not sure yet about how the mechanics inside will work but we’re working on it. Anyway, this mechanics will provide the compost directly to a pot where the plants are planted.
We imagined captors that will tell the user how the compost is doing (do I need to add water? To mix it a little bit?) and others that will tell about how the plants are doing. But it doesn’t stop here, we want to make this tool as playful and easy as possible. That’s why we want to create a smart (AI) personal assistant that gives advice about the compost, what to do with the waste, proposes recipes people can share with other users) and informations about what to put – or not – in a compost.
So here, you have some information about our idea, but as said before it’s a work in progress ! It may go under some massive changes and improvements but the idea will remain the same; help people deal with their food waste 🙂
Follow us to stay updated about our project and don’t hesitate to give us feedbacks !
Thanks for reading us,
See you !
