Intro to Biodesign
In the spring semester of 2021, I was incredibly fortunate to be able to take an Intro to Biodesign class. Our team, eventually named Team Postmix, decided to focus on developing a new approach to composting.
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The fellow Honors students that make up Team Postmix are Saiprasad Naidu, Ritwicq Arjyal, and Jasmine Kaur.
The Beginning
When our team began ideation for what biodesign problem we wanted to seek a solution to, we each reflected back on issues we ourselves had had a hand in trying to solve on a personal level. We found that we each had experience in projects benefitting the environment. For example, in high school, I was part of a club teaching elementary school children how to grow healthy foods and prepare delicious things with them, and I also volunteered at the community garden.
Additionally, we found that we each had a passion for helping our communities. We all volunteered regularly, and all of us agreed that whatever our topic was, we needed to not only generate a possible solution, but also educate the community on why the solution was necessary and what small things they could be doing to help.
We landed on creating a solution to make composting more accessible to a wide range of lifestyles and communities, and thus PostMix's research and ideation phase began.
The Problems
Compost Quality
While compost can simply be created from any amount of food scraps of many varieties that one may have lying around, there is also the concept of the "perfect" compost: a warm, wet, and well-maintained ratio of 2:1 browns (carbon-rich) to greens (nitrogen-rich) to produce a well-decomposed and sweet-smelling compost.
Maintenance
A well-kept compost pile requires ratio maintenance, aeration (turning the pile), temperature regulation, moisture regulation, and the creation of a welcoming environment for a range of necessary micro-organisms. Many casual composters can't maintain a high level of upkeep, or may not even be aware of these needs for their pile.
User Experience
Cincinnati has had community composting initiatives before, namely Compost Cincy in the early 2010s. The project was shuttered, in part due to poor community reception due to the odor and other egregious oversights on the part of the project. There is no point in developing a composting solution if its users experience a substantial negative effect as a result.
Accessibility
Many people would love to compost or otherwise help the environment, but are shut out by many factors. In urban areas, the inaccessibility is often a result of lack of space or being priced out. A space-effective, publicly-accessible composting solution may eliminate many of these concerns.
Education
Education not only in how to compost, but also on the benefits of composting for the Earth and the community, is essential to ensuring the success of this kind of widespread initiative. The community at the center of the project deserves accessible and comprehensive education on the ways they- as individuals and as a community- can make a difference.
Community Outreach
Community unity and engagement is more important than other. When planning the project, we wanted to ensure that it was something that would give back to the community it's based in. We knew it would be essential to get the community interested in the project, and to make them feel that they were making a difference in the world around them by participating.
The Solution
We decided to create a compost collection box to be placed in popular areas, such as school dining halls and restaurant districts- though the device is also viable for home and personal use. This box is called PostMix, and would be innovative in its accessible, low-maintenance approach to creating high-quality compost. The machine would have different deposit slots for browns (carbon-rich materials), greens (nitrogen-rich materials), and liquids, and would use pressure and moisture sensors to dispense each of these three elements at the appropriate time and volume to create a balanced 1:2 brown:green ratio with appropriate moisture.
The device would also contain a sort of central mixer, which would aerate the compost by turning it at specific times, eliminating the need for turning to be done by hand. It would also contain a temperature regulator, keeping the compost at the optimal temperature for decomposition.
In terms of community engagement and education on the initiative, we planned to launch social media campaigns, which would serve the purpose of both advertising the product's benefits and educating the community on the benefits of composting. We additionally planned to partner with community gardening efforts such as the Civic Gardening Center to ensure all compost generated goes directly back into benefiting the communities it came from.
Idea Evolution
Select each image to learn more about this phase of ideation.
Final Presented Design
Our final design utilizes a variety of sensors and tools, as described above. Additionally, the containment tubes in which the compostable material will be deposited now directly match the intended 1:2 ratio at an appropriate scale. The containment tubes are also now equipped with lids to mitigate smell. We also considered the implementation of a formal de-odorizer component to the design; however, this did not ultimately make it into the presented design.
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Additionally, this design features a camera, which would hopefully allow the machine to view what items were being placed into it to ensure that only compostable materials were being put in, and that they were being placed into the correct tubes. Additionally, this camera could monitor compost health from the inside. This interior monitoring can help the community maintainers of the box to more quickly identify and mitigate problems as they appear. It may also serve as a unique educational tool, with the community possibly being able to view the composting process take place within the box.
Future Steps
Biodesign Challenge Presentation
Team PostMix had the honor of being one of two teams representing the University of Cincinnati at the Midwest Biodesign Challenge Hub, held on April 21st, 2021. We also had a follow-up presentation with our professors held on April 26th, 2021. Not only did these give us incredible experience in being able to present and justify our solution, they also gave us a very broad idea of the many steps we can take going forward, both to improve the idea and to present it to other like-minded individuals for critique.
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We plan to continue to develop our PostMix idea over the summer of 2021 and prepare it to be presented at the 2021 Biodesign Challenge Summit from June 21st - 25th. Some specific finalized presentables we will work on for the Summit include finalized branding and logo, social media presence, and 3D modeling and/or physical prototypes of PostMix.
Design Flaws and New Implements
The groups we presented to, along with individuals we interviewed throughout our process, raised many amazing ideas for how we could improve PostMix. Going forward on the project, we will be researching de-odorizers to add to the apparatus. Additionally, though we planned to add a temperature sensor, we did not plan to add any specific temperature-regulating implement- an oversight we'll rectify in future designs.
Community Outreach and Proof of Concept
This, personally, is the aspect of PostMix that I am most excited to work on over the upcoming summer. Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic at the time we developed PostMix's design, we were unable to go directly out into the community to test the concept, or to interview the people who would be using it most. As community is such a large part of PostMix's model, their input will be essential to the implementation of the product and the addition of new features
As campus continues to re-open over the summer, our goal is to place some prototype of the device- even a low-fidelity prototype- into dining halls. Our goal is to see if students and dining hall workers will actually use the device, and if it will be used as intended (proper sorting of browns and greens, etc.). Seeing how a product like this is actually used in the community will give us valuable feedback in shaping PostMix's future design and implementation. Additionally, we'd like to directly interview dining hall workers, campus sanitation management, and even students to see if they believe the concept is viable as implemented and what we can do to improve.
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With our finalized branding and logo, we also plan to start our social media awareness, advertisement, and education campaigns and spread composting information into the community.
Resources Used
Food Waste FAQs. (2012). USDA. https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs​
Food waste warriors: A deep dive into food waste in US schools. (2019). World Wildlife Fund. https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/food-waste-warriors​
Institute for Local Self-Reliance. (2016). Growing local fertility: A guide to community composting. https://ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/growing-local-fertility.pdf​
Mike DiPaola. Personal Interview. Apr 2021​
Sapattatham, M., & Papasraton, B. (2010). Design Concept for Garbage Bin with Situation Awareness Feature. International Conference on Advances in Information Technology, 147–153. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16699-0_16​