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From Food Scraps to Living Soil: Why Bokashi Beats the Bin

Alex Montgomery
Nov 3
3 min read

Most of us know the feeling: you open your food caddy at the end of the week and get hit with a smell you’d rather forget. Flies buzzing, slimy liners, half-rotten scraps. It feels unpleasant, and let’s be honest, it doesn’t exactly inspire us to care about where our food waste goes.

But here’s the truth: the way we currently handle food waste is designed for volume, not quality. That’s fine for industrial systems like Bristol Waste and GENeco, which do an incredible job processing massive amounts of scraps every day, but it’s not the best way to build healthy soils in our city.

That’s where bokashi composting comes in.

Aerial view of an industrial facility with large tanks, pipes, and conveyors. Two workers in orange safety suits walk near the machinery.

Why Council Food Bins Stink

Conventional food waste systems, like the weekly caddy collection, let scraps sit around exposed to air. That means oxygen + moisture = rotting. And rotting equals smells, flies, and contamination.

Even if you use compostable liners, they’re stripped out before anaerobic digestion anyway, and studies show many don’t fully break down in those systems. Some even contain hidden fossil-fuel plastics despite the “100% compostable” labels. Not only are they unnecessary, but they can also contribute to the contamination problem.

The result? A waste system that works for generating biogas but not for generating trust in the compost products that return to land.

Enter Bokashi: Fermentation, Not Rot

Bokashi is a Japanese method of handling food waste that flips the script. Instead of letting scraps rot, bokashi ferments them. Here’s how it works:

Scraps go into an airtight container (we use reclaimed buckets).
They’re covered with bokashi bran (a mix of bran, molasses, and beneficial microbes).
The lid is sealed.

Inside, the microbes get to work, fermenting the food instead of decomposing it. The difference? No smell, no flies, and no mess.

The “pre-compost” that comes out of a bokashi bin is packed with preserved nutrients and microbial life. It can then be added to soil, compost heaps, or wormeries, where it breaks down quickly into rich, living compost.

White buckets filled with assorted food scraps, including bread, vegetables, and fruit peels, set against a dark, textured ground.

Cleaner Inputs, Cleaner Outputs

Here’s the part that matters most for cities like Bristol: bokashi keeps the scraps clean. No liners, no contamination, no nasty smells that turn people off composting.

Cleaner scraps mean cleaner compost. Cleaner compost means soils we can actually trust to grow food in. And trusted compost means communities are more likely to engage.

Contrast this with industrial anaerobic digestion: great for energy, but the digestate product has trust issues. Farmers and gardeners often don’t want to use it because of contamination fears, including microplastics, forever chemicals, and a lack of transparency.

Scaling Behaviour Change

The beauty of bokashi is that it’s simple enough for a single household, and scalable enough to power community compost hubs.

At Generation Soil, we’re building a network of neighbourhood hubs where scraps are collected, fermented, and turned into living soil for gardens, allotments, and green spaces. We believe up to 20% of Bristol’s food waste could be handled this way, just as Surabaya in Indonesia has shown.

We’re not in competition with Bristol Waste or GENeco. They’ll always need to handle the majority of scraps. Instead, we’re filling a gap: regenerating soils at the neighbourhood scale, with cleaner inputs and higher-quality outputs.

From Scraps to Soil, Not Just Gas

Every food scrap is a potential seed of regeneration. Right now, most of Bristol’s scraps are exported out of the city and turned into energy. Useful, yes. But energy isn’t food. It doesn’t feed our soils.

With bokashi and local composting, those scraps can stay in Bristol, closing the loop:

Household scraps → Bokashi fermentation → Compost hubs → Living soil → Local food.

It’s not waste. It’s the foundation of resilience.

What You Can Do

🌱 Ditch liners. Try old bread bags, paper, or nothing at all.

🌱 Try bokashi. Airtight, smell-free, perfect for flats.

🌱 Join the Bristol Living Compost Project. Keep your scraps in the city and help regenerate local soils.

From food scraps to living soil, bokashi beats the bin every time.

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About Generation Soil CIC

Generation Soil is a Bristol-based non-profit turning food waste into living soil. Through the Bristol Living Compost Project, our workshops, and regenerative market gardens, we’re building a circular food system that keeps nutrients local and restores biodiversity across the city.

Every handful of compost we make begins as Bristol’s food scraps transformed through microbes, biochar, and community action. From households to schools and businesses, we help people connect with the soil beneath their feet and the food on their plates.