Food Recycler Turns Scraps Into Fertilizer In 24 Hours

Composting leftover organic material from your daily life is eco-friendly, not to mention the responsible thing to do. Traditionally, it's also a commitment to turning a large pile of warm, rotting this-and-that with a shovel every couple of weeks until the finished product is ready. Not anymore. Enter: The Zera Food Recycler, a DIY fertilizer solution from Whirlpool's W Labs, the same folks that brought you the Vessi beer fermenter and Swash "clothing refresher."

The WiFi– and bluetooth-enabled electronic box, which looks like a sleek trash receptacle, is as useful for avid gardeners as it is for resourceful apartment-dwellers with garden boxes. It has the capacity to process eight pounds of scraps at a time and features a built-in sensor that moves material to the bottom of the device, where it's heat-processed to kickstart the decomposition process. The result: two pounds of fresh fertilizer made with stuff you would have just thrown away — and much happier plants. It's a great solution to help cut down on landfill waste and methane output, 20 percent of which is made up of compostable scraps.

At a projected $1,119 per unit, the Zera is on the far end of pricey. Early backers of the project, which launches on Indiegogo this January, can nab it for $699 and cut a months-long, space-intensive process down to mere hours. Check it out in action below.