Hygienic Waste Co, in close collaboration with ReLondon, aims to transform the way we handle food waste recycling. Our mission is simple: to make food waste collection a more pleasant experience for households while simultaneously incentivising positive behaviour change towards recycling. This project employs human-centred design techniques to help gather insights from key stakeholders through Living Lab user-testing (facilitated by Lambeth Council). This approach will accelerate product development of the company's novel device that helps address hygiene concerns relating to food waste collection. The project focuses specifically on people living in flats/ apartment blocks, as this context is considered to be particularly challenging, and also due to the growing proportion of this property type in London (and other urban centres). The positive outputs from this project will have far reaching implications. Not only will it revolutionise food waste recycling for people living in flats, but help provide a clean source of biogas to heat homes. By offering solutions that work seamlessly for residents, HWC hopes to drive widespread adoption and increase overall recycling rates in London and other UK cities -- thus helping divert large volumes of food waste from disposal, which has significant negative environmental impacts, and towards more regenerative applications, such as Anaerobic Digestion.

Y2B2 is a low-cost dehydration device for kitchen food waste caddies that helps eliminate the 'yuck factor' and makes food waste recycling more easy. Ultimately this improves hygiene in the home and helps households contribute to a more circular food system, where the value of food waste -- both as an organic fertiliser and clean energy source -- is better harnessed. Furthermore, evidence suggests that the act of collecting food waste acts as a prompt to users to reduce the amount of edible food they waste -- not only does avoiding food waste have obvious environmental benefits, it corresponds to cost savings to the household.