Subpod Compost Bin Seats on Kickstarter

Now you literally take a seat on last night's leftover scraps and a few hundred worms. 

You might never even have thought of that idea as a good time before, but if you have either limited space or you have food scraps, you are about to find out why it's actually a damned fine idea.

There is so much to love about the new composter, Subpod, currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter. For starters, you can compost food waste, grow healthy new food and get a spare garden seat thrown in. My favourite thing to love isn't just that this thing doubles as a seat, but also that it is so well designed, it doesn't smell and doesn't attract pests. And that means you can put a lid on it and literally put it anywhere you have ground to bury it in.

The Subpod composter has been years in development, so the fact that it looks like a brown plastic box with holes in it, belies a pile of research and testing. Subpod is literally an in ground composter and the holes are to allow worms to move freely in and out of your food waste at the same level as the roots of the surrounding plants.

While it makes sense for this to be your veggie garden (for free natural fertiliser), any garden works, even no garden at all. The free movement of worms quickly composts your food at the same time as improving the soil around the composter. 

A note on the fact that this composter is made of plastic

Like many of you, we are a little concerned that this composter is so plastic! And virgin plastic to boot. Setting aside the fact that most composters are made of plastic (which doesn't make this 'right'), Subpod say that so far they have found that the best material  to manufacture Subpods is polypropylene which has no endocrine disruptor chemicals and with no detectable leaching. 

Because the Subpod is designed for durability and long life use, they are initially making Subpods from virgin polypropylene and will field test blends of up to 50% recycled polypropylene to verify these blends have sufficient strength and longevity to permit the use of a percentage of recycled polypropylene in Subpod manufacturing.

Using polypropylene, Subpods are expected to have a minimum usable lifespan of 10-15 years in the soil without any leaching or degradation which is important since the Subpod will contain and be surrounded by a microbe-dense soil in a wide range of conditions, including damp and high humidity areas.

Doubling as bench seating requires that the materials chosen support body weight. Polypropylene based Subpods can bear up to 200 kilograms.

The team have sold over 800 on pre-order and for every 10 sold, they give one to a school or community group (like a community garden). They have a number of installations in Australia and off shore in private homes, schools and commercial spaces like Spell and The Gypsy and Santos Organics in Byron. (The Subpod ships in a flatpack and assembles in less than 5 minutes. Digging the hole might take a little longer.)

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