The same Kelowna-based company that garnered world attention with the Pela biodegradable smartphone case, has now turned its attention to kitchen waste.
They are pre-selling Lomi, a simple-to-use composter that you can put on your countertop.
Pela CEO and Co-founder Matt Bertulli said the appeal of Lomi is its simplicity.
"While you sleep, Lomi is turning your kitchen scraps into dirt," said Bertulli, "which is a massive improvement over how we handle food waste right now."
But he said it's what it does for the environment that is motivating people to buy into the idea.
Pela phone cases have kept the equivalent of 48 million plastic bags out of our waste stream, but Bertulli said Lomi is orders of magnitude more important in its potential environmental impact.
"Landfills are starved of oxygen and organic matter doesn't break down very well when there's no oxygen so that produces methane," he explained.
"Methane is like 80 times worse than carbon, it's awful," Bertulli continued. "The whole process is a very bad process for the planet."
The countertop composters don't emit methane, just good topsoil.
"You dump it in the garden, throw it on your grass, put it in a planter whatever you have to do," he said from the company's breezy office on the sixth floor of Kelowna's Innovation Centre.
He stood beside a series of prototypes of the final product.
"One of these is doing the job of a hundred trees," said Bertulli.
Lomi can produce soil in as few as four hours, but he recommends the eco mode, which takes about 20 hours to produce some high-quality soil.
Well over 20,000 have been pre-ordered, and the company will not be shipping them out until near the end of the year.
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