Jul 6, 2024
Composting Helps the Environment, The Palm Bin w/ Manali Yavatkar
AZ TRT S05 EP26 (241) 6-30-2024
What We Learned This Week:
· Composting is good for the environment, providing nutrients for soil.
· The daily process of collecting your food waste for composting is difficult, messy, & stinky.
· Palm Bin is a refrigerated composting appliance that makes the process easy, & looks nice on your counter.
· Long-term the composting process can be as simple as putting out your trash or recycling
Guest: Manali Yavatkar
Website: https://presale.palmlabs.co/
California conscious entrepreneur Manali Yavatkar is leading a new Gold Rush with Palm Bin . A smart appliance for compost collection, Palm Bin preps food waste for nutrient rich “Black Gold compost.” It easily prepares the food waste for residential city curbside collections, recycling centers and private community compost groups.
This breakthrough appliance was created to target the 93,200,000,000 pounds of food waste that are sent to landfills from our homes each year, where it produces 20 billion pounds of methane.
A Greener Bin from Initial Design to Purpose
Palm Bin allows users to collect food scraps for composting without the smell and mess, while maintaining the moisture and microbes in food. Its innovative cooling tech uses thermoelectric semiconductors to keep food scraps cold and stop the growth of odor-causing bacteria.
Ultimately, Palm Bin eliminates those nuisances associated with food waste recycling including:
- Odor and mess
- Fruit flies and other pests
- Need for frequent cleaning
- High energy usage required to grind and dehydrate food scraps
Notes:
Seg 1
Food waste is common problem. Where does it go? It’s delivered to a landfill which is very compact. The breakdown of the food waste makes methane. This enhances the climate change problem.
Composting breaks down food, and you divert the waste from a landfill to use in soil. There’s a potential issue where we could run out of potting soil in the next decade plus.
Compost can be an additive to potting soil. It adds nutrients and helps reduce erosion. It also helps keep water in the soil, so then you could use less water for plants.
It is common to see curbside compost collection, especially on the west coast. Just like recycle or trash pick up, a separate green bin is provided by the city to pick up once a week
Currently when people are doing composting, they put their food in a separate bin which sits at room temperature. It stays warm and then you grow fruit flies. It also does not smell good.
Palm Bin is a composting appliance product, which sits on your countertop. It looks good plus holds all organics. It keeps them cool and comes with a liner for the bin. Easy to clean and maintain.
Composting process is a weekly pick up and is taken to a facility to be composted at scale. They create massive piles of food, waste and brown matter. Food waste creates nitrogen. You’re looking to use the brown matter for the carbon part, this could be sawdust, cardboard, or leaves.
You also need 40 to 60% moisture so microbes break down the compost. Heated up during the process and it takes about 2 weeks. You also need venting for oxygen air rating.
Seg 2
Manali Bio: she’s from Portland, Oregon, and a Columbia grad in biomedical engineering. She studied equipment and products. Out of college she became a data scientist for a healthcare startup.
When she was a San Francisco resident, she was first introduced to composting. It was a messy smelly process, so she was looking for a solution and could not find one.
Typically people kept their food waste in the fridge, which is not a great plan. Manali built a prototype and tested it with lots of stinky food like fish
Palm Bin is very well designed, and easy to empty. Has a removable caddy. The interior holds the liner and the caddy. You just carry the caddy to an outside bin. You can clean in a dishwasher. Has removable parts like the lid, to be easy to clean.
There are two groups of people trying composting. It’s either too smelly and a bad experience, or they have not tried it yet because they assume the process is a pain.
Palm Bin interviewed 80 customers to check the user experience, to confirm it is easy. Is just as easy as putting trash in a bin
Cost is $249, like a high-end appliance. They have a good repair program and sustainable parts.
Company set up as a team of five, with Manali as the only full-time employee.
Currently, it’s a direct to consumer product sold online. Down the road they could go into retail. Other options to work with commercial customers like apartment buildings who have ESG goals, and want to get rid of food waste and do composting.
Looking for customers who have a personal experience with the problem and are more prone to want to do composting and work with the environment.
Seg 3
Website: Presale.palmbin.co
They created a prototype in 2023, and have been testing the product in 2024. They did a kickstarter platform. This is good because customers are first to use and test it. April 2024 the kick starter goal was funded.
They do pre-orders prior to manufacturer, raising funds.
Then you do the manufacturer part where you have to design the product for tooling and prototypes. This is done in the USA, and is quicker with shipping.
They’re using sustainable materials and making a high-end product. Expected delivery for the kickstarter customers is December 2024.
Currently with kickstarter they’re still doing a late raise of funding so people can still order.
They’re also raising funds through friends, family, and some investors. Expectation to move on to Angel Investors, Family Offices and micro venture capital or VC interested in consumer hardware.
Palm Bin is building products that help you waste less. Their goal is to reduce waste.
When you consume anything, that equals waste. You have products in a lifestyle that track your waste so you can do diversion and lower your waist.
You can’t know the numbers if you don’t measure what you’re doing. Palm Bin is a Linked product IOT with an app. It sends data to the cloud to measure waste.
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