How Our System Works
This is what happens to your food scraps after it leaves your kitchen.
It follows a simple, local loop:
Food. Compost. Soil. Food.
Everything happens in Bristol.
1. Collection
This is where the loop begins.
At home, you collect your food scraps in a sealed bokashi bucket. Sprinkle bokashi bran as you go to keep things clean, odour-free, and easy to manage indoors.
When your bucket is full, request a swap through your member portal. We collect full buckets across Bristol and leave you a clean one.
2. Fermentation
This prepares food waste for composting
Inside the bucket, food waste is fermented using beneficial microbes. This process prevents rotting, reduces smell, and starts the breakdown before composting begins.
It works in a similar way to how foods like sauerkraut or kimchi are made. The biology is already doing its work before we even collect the bucket.
3. Local Processing
Everything stays within Bristol.
Collected material is taken to our composting hub in Bristol. It is mixed with woodchip and other organic materials to create the right conditions for composting.
Nothing is exported. Nutrients stay where they came from.
4. Composting
This is where biology does the work.
Microbes and fungi break the material down over time.
The pile heats up, cools down, and transforms.
This stage builds the physical and biological structure of the compost.
5. Maturation
This is where compost becomes living.
The compost is left to settle and stabilise. Fungal networks develop. Nutrients balance. Biology becomes more complex.
This is what turns it into living compost rather than just processed organic matter.
6. Return
This is where the loop closes.
Finished compost is returned to Bristol. To gardens, allotments, community growing spaces, and our food forest market garden in Abbots Leigh.
It improves soil structure, water retention, and biological activity. The loop closes.
Why This Matters
Most food waste leaves cities. When it does, the nutrients go with it and soil slowly becomes depleted.
This system does the opposite. It keeps nutrients local, rebuilds soil biology, and creates a loop that continues as long as people take part.
Good compost takes time. Different batches are always moving through different stages. The system runs continuously across Bristol.
Take part
This system is already running across Bristol. You can be part of it.
testimonial
Turning my food waste into the best compost I've ever used! Couldn't be happier 💚