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Comment by m3kw9 | Hacker News Reader

“ The company supplies bacteria that can process 98 percent of organic waste into water and carbon dioxide in just 24 hours, eliminating the need to turn it into compost, which is often not put to use. Fresh bacteria are added every three months for quality control.”

Sounds good but I sense a lot of gotchas like where will water go, smell, clean up, does it work in subzero

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>> does it work in subzero

The firm is headquartered in Sapporo. It doesn't directly answer the question, but certainly Hokkaido is not unfamiliar with such temperatures.

There seems to be a solar and a battery component. Also, it is required to sit on a concrete base. Presumably, temperature management is a key part of the system.

> eliminating the need to turn it into compost, which is often not put to use

I am skeptical about this part of the explanation.

We have strict limits on the amount of compost we can take from our city composting plant. Is this a real problem?

In my city, you can get as much as you'd like for free. We're not a very big/dense city.

I know farmers that are using city compost to replace chemical fertilizers for their vegetables. There is probably an over supply of compost in some places, but it feels this will probably reverse over time as farmers adapt their techniques.

From the article: Waste deposited in the boxes will decompose in a day meaning that, unlike regular compost, they will not produce any unpleasant odors, she said.

It doesn't seem to answer your other "gotchas".

Now just do it with plastic!

Isn't this just the same thing that happens with sewage plants. In the anaerobic digester before the bardenpho phase?

Why would you want to do this with plastic? Food decomposes into methane and CO2. Methane is bad from a climate change perspective. If you can convert food to purely CO2, then you can improve greenhouse gas emissions. It’s even better if you can capture the CO2. Plastic, on the other hand, does not readily decompose into CO2. If you were to put it through a process that decomposes it, you would make greenhouse gas emissions worse.

Because the ocean is filled with it and the way it degrades causes it to become very small and ingested by sea creatures and concentrate up the food chain with deleterious effects for all involved.

Plastic requires specific bacteria that can digest it. Still pretty early days for that.

It would be easier to reduce plastic to biochar at 1000C and bury it in farm fields or underground.

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