Microorganisms Turn Kitchen Waste into Compost, a Major Part of a Circular Lifestyle

A company was founded on the idea of creating a system in which everything needed to put safe and reliable food on our tables every day is circulated within a two-kilometer radius. The company, named Local Food Cycling Co., Ltd., is striving to build an eco-conscious society centered on home composting — a process where the power of microorganisms is harnessed to break down kitchen waste and convert it into compost.

We talked to the company’s president, Taira Yuiko, about its initiatives, in line with the company’s name, to popularize the circular lifestyle mindset.

A search for pesticide-free vegetables found a break in the regeneration cycle

Taira joined a securities firm after graduating from university. She quit her job when she got married and was fully intending to shift to a life focused on raising a family. But then something happened in her life over 25 years ago that caused her to devote herself to promoting a circular lifestyle.

Taira Yuiko, president of Local Food Cycling

“My dad, who was like a friend to me, was diagnosed with terminal cancer shortly after he retired. The hospital where he was admitted claimed he had only three months to live and subjected him to a battery of tests. I was worried I would regret it if I did nothing to help, so I talked to a friend and she recommended I try a dietary cure for him at home. My dad agreed, but from the day we brought him home from the hospital, we ran up against a seemingly insurmountable wall.”

The wall was the near-impossibility of finding pesticide-free vegetables anywhere in the city of Fukuoka. The few pesticide-free vegetables she managed to find were very expensive and not fresh.

“I had never taken an interest in our food production system, so I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get fresh, pesticide-free vegetables. While attending to my dad, I researched our food production system bit by bit. What I learned is that because we consumers choose vegetables that look attractive, producers and farmers are essentially forced to use pesticides and chemical fertilizers in order to produce vegetables that will sell.”

Having rediscovered the importance of food, Taira was next concerned about what her baby daughter will eat in the future.”

“I believed that in 20 years’ time the environment would be in even worse shape. As I studied more about the environment, I came to realize the massive impact our modern lifestyles are having on the environment and the land. Our way of life is disrupting nature’s self-regulating functions and destroying ecosystems.

“For millions of years, the soil had gotten increasingly fertile as the feces and carcasses of organisms and plants were returned to the soil and converted into nutrients. In our modern era, however, kitchen waste is incinerated and human waste is flushed down the toilet and sewers. This means nutrients are not being returned to the soil in a natural state. The natural regeneration cycle is broken, and the soil has become something different from what it once was.”

With the aim of becoming a “composting geek”, Taira poured her energy into research, development, and training personnel

After much trial and error looking at ways to restore nature’s regeneration cycle, Taira came up with the idea of composting — converting kitchen waste into fertilizer.

“Kitchen waste accounts for 30 to 40 percent of all household waste. I thought if we can convert this waste into nutrients and create a cycle in which the nutrients are used to grow vegetables, we can speed up the attainment of an ideal circular economy. Reaching this hypothesis was the starting point of what we are doing today.”

In order to spread word about composting, Taira’s aim was to become a “composting geek”. Using her body of research and personal connections, she established the NPO Junkan Seikatsu Kenkyujo [Circular Lifestyle Laboratory] in 2004. The NPO’s mission was to conduct R&D into composting materials, build an organization, and train people to promote the concept of a circular lifestyle.

“Soon after setting up the NPO, we were getting several hundred requests a year for courses on circular lifestyles centered on composting. Because we couldn’t keep up with demand, we quickly pivoted to encouraging the growth of rival organizations. In order to publicize composting to as many people as possible, we freely shared our accumulated knowledge base and focused on holding courses and training personnel in different regions.”

Adopting a personnel training model from the UK and building up the organization with the cooperation of university professors, Taira’s NPO has so far trained more than 200 leaders all over Japan and in parts of Asia. The NPO is now in a position to promote the circular lifestyle to some 85,000 people a year. The organization continues to put resources into composting research and has introduced such innovations as cardboard composters.

Creating a mechanism that gets people who only pay lip service to the cause to actually compost

The next turning point came around 2015. Taira was beginning to sense resistance to the circular lifestyle mindset they were promoting.

“One day the reality dawned on me that more than 90 percent of people still toss out kitchen waste as regular garbage and don’t practice composting. I also noticed people who were telling me I was doing something wonderful but at the same time not composting. It was agonizing to acknowledge that all our efforts might be in vain unless we could devise a mechanism that, at the very least, gets people sympathetic to our cause to actually compost. I had to admit that I was trying to do too much on my own, so I started looking around for a fresh approach.”

Calling on like-minded government officials and university professors, Taira launched a study group. What emerged from the study group was LFC Compost, a composting system for urban dwellers, and Local Food Cycling, a movement to circulate necessary food items within a two-kilometer radius. In concert with these moves, Taira established a business to accelerate pilot projects as well as further the dissemination of the circular lifestyle concept.

A chicken was used as the LFC Compost logo so people could easily envision the idea of circulating resources

“We developed LFC Compost for people living in urban apartment buildings. The bag was designed to not look out of place when set out on a balcony, and it contains a newly developed composting material compounded from plant-based organic waste. It has a zipper to keep out insects and is virtually odor free when the zipper is closed. It is large enough to hold one to three months of kitchen waste.

“In the bag, the kitchen waste is decomposed and fermented by microorganisms and turns into nutrient-rich compost in about two to three weeks. You can even grow vegetables directly in the compost, using the bag as a planting bed.”

The program has a support system in place where users with questions can speak with supporters via LINE. Because the LFC Compost bags are significantly easier to use than cardboard composters, user numbers are growing, especially among city residents in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

The ultimate goal is to have safe vegetables on the dining table every day

Taira’s next two goals are: (1) create communities nationwide where people can take their finished compost in its bag to a farmers market within a two-kilometer radius and exchange it for vegetables from contract farmers, and (2) create community-supported agriculture (CSA) platforms that back those farmers who produce safe vegetables.

“My ultimate goal is for households everywhere to have safe vegetables on their dining tables every day. To achieve this, we need a circular lifestyle that is enjoyable to engage in and for people in the community to direct local resource circulation by having everyone help out in the process of producing food. This is why we went with the name Life Food Cycling, which has two meanings: to be a mechanism that local people operate themselves and to circulate nutrition within an area that can be covered by bicycle.

“In fact, LFC Compost users have been coming up with new ideas, such as cooking in ways that create less waste or growing vegetables, in cities with little land, on building rooftops using the compost they make. The movement is still at the project level in only a limited number of areas at the moment, but we want to expand it to more people all over the country.”