Kaicycle ends its HotRot project

Sad news from Kaicycle back in March (somehow I completely missed this):

With heavy hearts, we have made the incredibly tough decision to shut down our HotRot operation and site. While we were making awesome compost, despite our best efforts we couldn’t see a financially viable future for the operation, as was our goal.

I covered Kaicycle over a year ago – they were some of the first people to chat with me for threesixtysix.

In that article, I was excited that the small team was looking to scale up. Scaling a solution is difficult. Anyone who tries it is owed a lot of respect in my eyes.

It sounds like the journey for Kaicycle was hard, really hard:

• over a year’s delay in consenting (for a project funded by council!)
• two months of delay because of repairs needed for the machine
• increasing labour costs because they were still figuring out good processes
• difficulty growing their customer base to meet their new capacity
• a space that just wasn’t big enough.

So, for Kaicycle, it just makes sense for them to stay small.

“We still see promise for using in-vessel composting systems in urban areas, but we have learnt that our manual composting system is really well suited to Kaicycle’s current business model and foreseeable scale. We’ve returned to manual composting at the farm, and will be pursuing our original “scaling out” approach of setting up more smaller composting hubs over time.”

I’m glad they are doing what makes sense for them. At the same time, the city needs to scale up composting. At its current output, Kaicycle processes just 0.13% of Wellington’s organic waste.

If the city wants to solve the climate pollution that comes from waste (which is only a tiny part of the city’s total climate problem, mind you), we need something that can deal with tens of thousands of tonnes.

The Council has signalled they’ll be introducing organic waste collection for the city next year. If all goes to plan, the vast majority of city dwellers won’t need Kaicycle’s service. That probably didn’t help their problem finding new business.

I’m a grateful customer of Kaicycle’s and I have been for years. I’ll keep supporting them. This news has got me thinking about a few things, though.

First, scale matters. Even if the HotRot was a roaring success, Kaicycle wouldn’t have been able to compost Newtown’s scraps let alone the whole city’s. We need solutions that solve big chunks of the challenge we face.

Next, doing things in the real world is hard. Saying that things need to be able to scale is easy enough, but you don’t know what ideas scale until they’ve had the runway to be tested. I’ve heard from a few charities that these new projects are fundable, but the money is one off. The routine operation of a project is hard to get money for – which means it’s really hard to work out the kinks in an idea without failing.

Lastly, Legislation needs to make doing good things easy. I know, no duh. But right now it’s really hard to set up urban composting hubs. It’s clearly very hard to get building consent for something that will reduce emissions (the HotRot). We need to modernise almost every technology that we depend on. The good stuff we need to build need to be easy to build.

Go well, Kaicycle. You have my respect for trying something. I’m glad you’ll still be just down the road.