Member Article

Former Sage employee turns composting innovator

After taking early redundancy from Sage, Tony Callaghan put his energies into designing a composting bin that would revolutionise household waste management.

HotBin reverses the amount of waster each household sends to landfill, and since battling two years with science and technology, Tony has finally developed a composting bin that can process more food and garden waste.

Now, HotBin has teamed up with Lease-a-Leaf and Sage UK in Gosforth to help speed up the ‘green waste’ process.

The aim is to return compost to the Sage gardens more quickly, from catering and garden waste.

Tony was set the challenge after being invited back to Sage by David Moorhead of the Environmental Services Team to share his new innovation with old colleagues.

Lease-a-Leaf manages the extensive gardens on behalf of Sage and has been composting coffee grinds and kitchen peelings from Sage’s onsite restaurant and café, along with garden shrubbery.

Philip Davidson, of Lease-a-Leaf said: “We hope to see the reward of our efforts by Spring with our newly installed HotBins.

“The traditional compost heaps we set up have become a bit unwieldy, the volume is too large as they do not break down as fast as we would like.”

David Moorhead, added: “As part of our ongoing commitment to implement beneficial environmental policies we like to introduce local companies to our employees through these environmental awareness days.

“Inviting Tony back to Sage was an obvious choice! His new HotBin has already had some great reviews from users and there certainly was a lot of interest from Sages employees on how it can help them recycle more food and garden waste.”

Tony was prompted to begin inventing after his wife told him to sort out his own, overflowing composting bin.

Once a prototype had been built, Tony realised there was the potential for commercial opportunity and turned to the help of Dr Richard Exley, Head of The Finance for Business North East Proof of Concept fund at Northstar Ventures.

The organisation invested over £170,000 of POC funds into Tony’s company, AC Innovation; turning the idea into the reality of production.

Tony said: “I enjoy solving problems and seeing the impact of the solution. I set out to design a composting bin that solves the three most common home composting problems.

“Home composting has historically been restricted by the limitation on the types of food you can actually compost, the time it takes to get results and the effects of odour that attracts unwanted visitors.

“The controlled, constant temperature along with the effective aeration allows the HotBin to effortlessly reduce and recycle food and garden waste into great compost all year round.

“Lease-a-Leaf will have no problems starting their HotBins in December to ensure great compost out on Spring to put on Sages gardens.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .