A new National College of Art and Design (NCAD) spin-out company called Obeo has introduced its first product – a compostable food waste box to separate food waste at home with no smells or mess in the kitchen.
Co-founders Kate Cronin and Elizabeth Fingleton also announced Dunnes Stores as the first retailer to support the new product and stocking it in stores nationwide from today.
The Obeo compostable food waste box sits on a kitchen counter top and is filled with daily food waste such as plate scrapings and tea bags. Once full, the box along with its contents is placed directly into the brown bin and a new box is opened. This means no cleaning in the kitchen and a fresher brown bin.
Obeo is made from certified compostable materials so it breaks down naturally along with the food waste in the composting facility without causing harm to the environment.
“Through our research we realised that current solutions for handling food waste did not solve the issues that customers have with their brown bins,” said Cronin.
“We discovered that there was a gap in the market for a product like Obeo that removes the yuck factors from food waste recycling such as smells, flies and bin juice.”
The two women have been working on the concept for the last 18 months, with the support of Enterprise Ireland, NCAD and NovaUCD, and the company is currently based in Origin8, the design innovation and commercialisation gateway at NCAD.
Fingleton said: “Our aim is to launch the Obeo product across Ireland and the UK before looking to the wider European market. In Ireland and the UK there are currently over 12 million households with a brown bin service, and this figure is steadily increasing. We plan to expand into the UK by the end of the year and we are currently in talks with a UK-based multiple.”
Source: Envirocenter.ie – Obeo Introduces Compostable Food Waste Box On Sale in Dunnes
