Revolutionising food waste — and death — through biotechnology
Luke Hamilton (left) and Zachary Sequoia (right)
We all know that composting is a good thing for the environment, and many of us may do it in our backyard. But what about things that are challenging to compost? Huum Bioreclamation is creating a science and technology-based platform to safely recycle complex and high-risk organic materials. And that includes perhaps even for composting humans. Yes, people. Editor Serina Bird chatted with director and cofounder Zachary Sequoia.
Startup Geek
Originally from San Francisco, Zachary Sequoia loves innovation. He’s a cofounder of and investor in several companies and has a background working in commercialisation and research. He describes himself as helping to ‘solve complex problems for the forces of good’.
Unsurprisingly, Sequoia has had a long association with the Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) and the Canberra innovation scene. He facilitated the CSIRO ON program alongside CBRIN for multiple cohorts, working with research teams to help take their projects to the next level. He also mentors startups on a pro-bono basis. He is also involved in tech work, serving as a director of Tennant Group, a technology and strategic consulting company that works to improve the sovereign capabilities of the Australian Defence Force.
Oh, and he spent nine months sailing a catamaran from Mexico across the Pacific back to Australia. What doesn’t Sequoia do?
And now Sequoia also became a cofounder and investor in science and tech composting startup Huum (pronounced Hume), winner of an ACT Government Innovation Connect grant last year.
FOGO
Luke Hamilton is an industrial composting expert working with the Bega Valley Shire Council, who has decades of experience in managing food waste.
If you live in Belconnen, Bruce, Cook or Macquarie you may be familiar with the Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) program, which is being trialled in over 5,300 households. Rather than throwing out food waste, participants put food scraps and garden waste into compostable green bags in a supplied kitchen caddy.
The FOGO program is not new to people living in the Bega Valley area, as it was one of the first areas in Australia to use the program. Hamilton was not only one of the first people to work on FOGO but was instrumental in the program’s success over the last ten years.
While FOGO was a success, it had its challenges. A big one was that the food waste was not ‘pure’, and could contain pathogens. That led Hamilton to think more deeply about how to compost difficult types of items. ‘Just like a lot of startup founders, he saw a problem within his industry that needed solving,’ said Sequoia.
The Bega Valley connection
Sequoia had known Hamilton and his work for many years. Sequoia has a strong connection with the Bega Valley, and sustainability, and sat on the Strategic Waste Committee that helped introduce FOGO. He also worked on bringing innovation into FOGO adoption, including through changing schedules of waste collection to incentivise people to put compostable waste into green bins. ‘We designed the economics of it by lowering the red pick-up and upping the green pick-up. And that was the hardest part because in a regional area, if people don't think it's easy to throw away stuff, they'll just throw it in the bush,’ he said.
Sequoia knew Hamilton was doing some cool composting tech, but ‘didn't quite realise how great it had become’. When he viewed Hamilton’s facility he realised it was beyond composting tech and more like mobile synthetic biology lab.’
Sequoia recognised that while Hamilton had a long and strong background in working hands-on with soil composting, to take the startup to the next level it would benefit from scientific rigor – and tech. So, they joined forces, with Sequoia coming on board as a director and cofounder with the mandate to connect Huum with researchers, tech experts and partners to help take Huum further on the journey.
The science of composting
Composting has been traditionally a backyard art. ‘For most people, it was a lick your finger and put in in the air and see if it will go well thing,’ joked Sequoia. Other than 50-year-old research from Cornell University, until now there was little testing of composting or associated processes to work out how to develop optimal processes.
But with composting now being carried out commercially, there is more impetus to develop stringent processes. For instance, NSW Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) penalises industrial waste composters for breaches of its strict regulations around the process, such as leachate pollution, odour control and feedstock limits.
‘Each of those things not only has an indirect environmental impact, and a financial impact when it gets a fine from the EPA. Not to mention it could tarnish its reputation the next time it wants to do something like expand its facility. It also costs them directly because with the FOGO programs, if something is wrong you may need to restart the entire batch – increasing overall production costs.
With Sequoia, the founders began to work with researchers at the University of Newcastle. There, researchers were working on isolating novel bacteria and other microbes with sophisticated bioreactors. And while this work was happening, no one had (until then) connected it with food waste.
Composting bulk food waste
Why is there a need for Huum to work with complex composting problems? Composting from your yard waste or small amounts of your own pure kitchen scraps is relatively straightforward. Anyone who has a compost bin or worm farm is familiar with what you can and can’t put in them, and is generally quite careful when doing so. There are several Canberra startups (such as Food2Soil and, until recently Capital Scraps) that reuse food waste or other organic waste material.
But it’s a different story when a Council collects large amounts of food waste from the public, as what has been delivered might be contaminated or have gone a bit funky. ‘It’s highly putrescible, filled with fat and protein. It can be full of pathogens, such as E coli and all kinds of nasty stuff,’ said Sequoia. ‘The problem statement is that consumers and governments are demanding that this stuff should be diverted away from landfills. The challenge statement is we will take the higher risk feedstocks that other folks either don’t want to do or those that are high risk enough that you know that you would have to invest more than normal compost.’
In 2015, the ACT Government made a zero-waste commitment. The issue now is that many people working in waste management aren’t soil scientists. Added to that, they need to create a safe working environment.
Animal composting
Ensuring safe composting of food waste isn’t all that Huum seeks to do. It is also developing ways to deal with animal mortalities.
Australians love their pets, with around 29 million pets in Australia. We don’t have the highest rate of pet ownership in the world, but it’s up there. With this comes a demand for end-of-life pet services.
With pet crematorium services in the United States already a billion-dollar industry, Sequoia sees the potential for eco-pet composting. While some companies in the US are doing this, none are yet well advanced.
And then, the need to deal with animal mortalities in a primary production country like Australia is a larger issue. Animals routinely die as part of food production. At industrial farms such as egg-laying facilities, thousands of deceased chickens are put into the ground. ‘This is part of the supply chain that people don’t see,’ said Sequoia. In addition, dairy farms often routinely dispose of bobby calves. ‘Male calves do not produce milk, so often end up in the ground, where they rot anaerobically, releasing methane,’ he said.
What if there were a large biosecurity event where herds of animals such as cows, sheep or pigs needed to be disposed of? ‘You can’t bury a million animals – it might release more methane than Sydney’s landfill does in a year,’ said Sequoia.
Huum is now communicating and collaborating with the NSW Department of Primary Industries to examine how to respond to a biosecurity event such as a foot-and-mouth disease incident. ‘We’re trying to figure out how we can safely do these things,’ he said. ‘This is very different again to homogenised shredded food waste because animals are ingots of protein and there’s no homogenisation for the microbes to get in. It has to be high temperature. There’s many types of composting and many types of material transformation.’
Death tech
A HUUM poster displayed at the ANU TechLauncher Projects Showcase in May 2024
As a society, we need sustainable end-of-life technologies. Huum is now working with the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne. This team has produced literature in recent years for the Federal Government on alternatives to things such as land use for burial plots in Sydney and the cost of cremation. Researchers are examining technologies such as hydrogen-powered crematoria and alkaline hydrolysis. They are also examining natural organic reduction. And this is where Huum comes in.
While human composting is not yet legal in Australia, Huum is working to make it a sustainable option that is affordable ethically and socially acceptable. ‘Compared with a crematorium, why not pay less and not produce 400kg of carbon dioxide at the end, right?’
Huum is partnering with south-coast nursery and landscaper Provincial Pastures, which supplied native plants to line Canberra’s light rail. The idea is for the project to achieve total circularity. ‘Huum can take feedstock from the nursery going in, and give back soil going out for the trial,’ said Sequoia.
Huum is also working with two researchers at RMIT, including an honours degree student who is talking to different religious leaders about how human composting could become a ubiquitous option without it even having to sound like something that is ‘eco’ or ‘green’. ‘How could we encourage Australians to think twice about whether this is actually green or not? These are the conversations we need to start having when there is a new way that’s is not only better for the environment, but cheaper and safe,’ said Sequoia.
Huum is working with students from ANU’s Techlauncher project, who are working on the IT side of human composting, as well as working with six engineers in the ANU Capstone Program.
The Hungry Caterpillar and Lyrebird
Huum is focused on R&D – for now. But it sees itself becoming a manufacturing company. The vision is to encourage local manufacturing with tech and machines built in the Bega Valley.
Composting? Manufacturing?
Huum is developing three streams of products. One of them is a machine called the Hungry Caterpillar, which is designed to work in multi-use dwellings (apartments) and organisations such as schools. A larger version of this, designed for municipal scale, is called the Lyrebird. With people increasingly living in urban environments, it’s not always easy or convenient to compost. And it’s hard to store waste and then transport it.
With the Hungry Caterpillar, people can put their green biodegradable plastic bags into a wholly automated machine. The machine balances its carbon-nitrogen, aeration and oxygen in a process. The machine is easy to use in schools – and can even be decorated to fit in a schoolyard. It also solves a problem in MUDs, where garbage trucks don’t always have access.
Humm has a large vision, which if realised, will enable composting in many sectors where it’s currently a bit too hard, revolutionising how we can live more sustainably in all aspects of our lives.
