Smart compost bin to quantify household food waste

Patrick Donnelly, assistant professor of computer science in the Oregon State University-Cascades College of Engineering is leading the project, which has received $640,000 in funding.

“At every other step of the agricultural supply chain, food waste is tracked, measured and quantified,” Donnelly said in a statement. “However, approaches to measuring post-consumer food waste are costly, time-intensive, prone to human error and infeasible at a large scale.”

Donnelly and OSU colleagues Jason Clark of the College of Engineering and Quincy Clark of the colleges of Agricultural Sciences and Education are aiming to create a kitchen compost container that automatically measures household food waste.

“We’re adapting our design to accommodate consumers’ current behaviour, using compost bins commonly distributed by waste utilities as a template,” said Donnelly. “When a user disposes of edible and non-edible food waste in the bin, our device prompts the user to describe the deposited items. The user’s note is then transcribed with automatic speech recognition and associated with a weight measurement of the items.”