As you're listening to me, Daisy, Apple's iPhone disassembly robot is dismantling an iPhone into lots of recyclable parts. That's how Apple recovers more materials than conventional recycling methods. Thanks, Daisy. Resmwater iPhone. Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head on. I'm Molly Wood.
So April just barely ended, but I did not want to let Earth Month go without one more conversation about consumer behavior. and the actions that you can take to make a difference in your own life and to send powerful signals to the companies that you buy from and maybe even work for. Last week, we talked about your eating habits.
But what you don't eat can sometimes have an even bigger impact than what you do eat. Food waste is such a major problem, and lots of companies are contemplating ways to reduce the food we waste at home. So this week, I want to spotlight a conversation I had early on in Everybody in the Pool's existence about a kitchen appliance that has honestly had a huge impact in my life.
And it's also a thoughtful conversation about designing things that people want to buy. Please enjoy this revisiting of my conversation with the co-founder of Mill, formerly the co-founder of The Nest Thermostat, Matt Rogers. Hi, I'm Matt Rogers, founder and CEO at Mill. I'm working on getting rid of food waste.
The whole reason why I started Nest way back in 2010 was because of climate change. It was. Okay. And I've actually kind of built my whole career on areas of climate that people overlook. And when I started Nest back in 2010, the kind of astonishing aha fact that kind of jumped out that was the whole impetus behind starting the company was that heating and cooling was responsible for half of home centers.
So it was like meaningful percentage of our emissions of our energy use. And we had these dumb white plastic boxes on the wall that no one could program. And that just didn't make sense to me. especially coming from Apple at the time. And the parallels to what we're doing at Mill are pretty obvious, actually. How so? Yeah, so Mill is an end-to-end food recycling service. So from your kitchen counter all the way back to the farm.
And we do everything in between. And yeah, like thinking about it, like taking a step back, like no one likes weight. No one's happy with trash. There's no pro-waste lobby out there. It's one of those things that we kind of accepted and we take for granted that we have to live with. But we don't. And we built Mill. as a way to build a new system. Can we build a system that is better, easier?
more user-friendly, odorless, and just like easier for a way of life, that's also better for the planet. And going back to the Nest example, People bought the Nest thermostat because it was cool. Because it looked good. Because they'd want to have it on their wall. Because their friends told them about it. But also, you'd feel really good that you'd save energy. So it has this kind of rational and emotional component to it.
Looks good. I feel good about it. I'm doing the right thing, but I'm saving money. I'm saving energy. And the parallels to what we're doing in waste are pretty clear. Yep. So then tell me about the evolution of… What was the aha moment about food waste? And waste in particular that made you go, okay, mill is the solution. Sort of a similarly maybe hidden climate cost for people. Yeah. So before we started mill, I was working.
as a climate investor and philanthropist doing grant making and investing in climate, looking for other overlooked solutions. I made a bunch of investments, helped a lot of new companies get started, started a few not-in-profits. in other overlooked areas and kind of always been looking for something that was going to change the waste industry. Because again, like if you look at Project Draw Now, that's a really good way of...
getting into climate. What are the things we have to go do? Right. For those who are not familiar, Project Drawdown is an unbelievably comprehensive book that effectively takes every sector of the economy, ranks it. in terms of emissions and mitigation and basically gives you a list. Like, here's where to start. That's right. And one of the top things on the list is getting rid of food waste. And as an engineer and designer, like, oh.
Did a lot of research, spent a lot of time talking to experts, being professors. And in the kind of the early days of the pandemic in 2020, my co-founder Harry and I would get on the phone or get on the Zoom with a lot of folks who were also stuck at home at the time. It was cool because everyone was available. No one's like, oh, I'm on vacation right now. So we were able to talk to a lot of experts.
What we learned is that preventing food waste is a behavior change issue. Actually, there are a lot of solutions that are out there. And there are a lot of cities that are making it accessible to folks. I'm in the Bay Area, like in San Francisco, we have a green bin. And what we learned is that even in cities that have green bins, people don't use them. And like, even in the best kind of the benchmark cities out there, like, you know, Seattle, the San Francisco area.
They talk about like 30% participation as like the gold standard. It's pretty bad. Wow. That's bad. So like looking at kind of the ecosystem when we were starting, we're like, okay, like behavior change. That's something that we know how to do. We make great products. We make great experiences that are really sticky that people love.
that are better than what came before. So that's what led to the evolution of milk. That's why we have this beautiful bin that goes in a kitchen that you'd actually would want to have. that is odorless, that takes weeks to fill up because that's better. Like that's the kind of stuff that's going to drive behavior change. Like, oh, it's a trash can. It's easy. You step on the pedal, it opens up. Great. But like all the other stuff is just easier and better.
Because like if it's gross and stinky and you get fruit flies or rats, like no one's doing this thing. Right. It's just not going to happen. And are those the barriers that you find to composting in terms of that 20 and 30 percent? I mean, I know people in my life who like I just have a little IKEA. bucket, and I empty it every day. And it's not that hard, but people really are resistant to having food scraps in the kitchen. I've been thinking about my own life. My wife and I are...
deep climate evangelist. We've dedicated our entire lives to fighting climate change. And we had a countertop pail. We had a fruit fly infestation we could just not get rid of. So I had bought this like yellow. sticky stuff that goes all around the house to hopefully catch those fruit flies. Even the most well-meaning households, that's a lot of inconvenience.
And Harry and I did a bunch of user research and user studies. We talked to people around the country. And we would talk to folks in D.C. or in New York City who are putting food waste in the freezer. And once a week, walking it down to the farmer's market, because that was the only place that would take it, other than the trash, obviously. Wow. So that's a lot of inconvenience. So thinking about...
that much inconvenience, like we knew we had to build a new system. Like the existing system is just not going to work. This idea of putting raw gross stuff outside of the curb. and then having diesel trucks drive it around and pick it up and then take it somewhere else. That's just like... Like if we were starting over, would we still do it that way?
What is the thing, you know, we've been explaining this, I think a couple of times here and there on the show on this show, but really break it down for us. Why food waste is such a big problem, why this is the thing to tackle and why it's so high on that project drawdown list. Yes. So and this is something that I think most folks don't understand. So when food goes in the trash, it goes to landfill and it just doesn't degrade into dirt.
Things get piled on top, landfills are sealed, and when food degrades without oxygen, it degrades anaerobically. and creates methane. And methane, as I'm sure everyone knows, is like public enemy number one. It's 80 times more potent than CO2 over the next 20 years in a time when we really need to be urgently stopping warming. So it's warming fast. So the kind of standard in climate science today is food waste is 8 to 10 percent of global emissions.
which is astronomical. That said, recent research, there was actually a study published in Nature just a couple weeks ago because that's, you know, like this is on the kind of forefront of science now that we're studying food waste. that actually it's more like 14% to 16% of emissions.
It's super high. And that's not just the methane side. That's the whole equation. That's the energy and the water it takes to grow the food and transport it and refrigerate it and the grocery stores and the whole end-to-end supply chain. The system we've created for food is pretty intensive to grow. It's a lot of work.
And then we go ahead and throw out 40% of that food that we grow. Right. And it could, we'll get to this part of the mill proposition in a minute. It has value. There is a waste to value chain. Okay. But first, before I get there, I'm jumping ahead. Describe it. Describe the product for us, for people who haven't read about it. It made a huge splash, of course, when it was announced. It was very exciting, but not everybody started.
When the team from Apple and Nest design a trash bin, you'd hope it would get some attention. Get some headlines. Yeah. And one of the funniest descriptions I've seen out there was an article just published recently that compared it to a very large version of AirPods.
Okay. Which is really funny. I can see that actually. It is kind of what it looks like. It's kind of what it looks like. So yeah, it's a beautiful white steel bin that has a wood veneer top. It has a beautiful stainless steel pedal that you step on and it opens up. very eloquently and you use it like a trash bin. Like you take your dinner plate or your cutting board scraps and you kind of swipe it in there. And that's kind of where the normalcy stops.
Like once the lid closed is where all the magic happens. It takes all the food that you put in and dries it and grinds it. So it dehydrates the food, takes the water. And because food is mostly water, food's like 80% plus water. It gets small and light and shelf stable. So like even that dried food, dried food lasts forever. You know, like astronauts have dried food.
It's light. You wouldn't want to put wet food up in rockets to get up to space. So it's cool. It's light. It's shelf-stable. It doesn't go bad. It doesn't smell. It takes weeks to fill up. So because it's dry, you could go and fill it up again and it's going to cook down the next day. Every day you wake up in the morning and it's empty again. So like it takes weeks to fill up. So at the end of week.
You take the bin and you dump it into one of the boxes we provide and you can send it back to us. The post office is going to come pick it up from your doorstep. Because it's not gross. You don't need to run a garbage truck anymore. Wow. You literally put this in a box and we will pick it up. And then we get it back to us. to sort it, sift it, clean it, pasteurize it.
to keep it as food as you say yeah so this is the i feel like this is the double unlock because presumably the way we are currently feeding chickens is to like create all new food or something really carbon intensive and probably gross yeah
about 30% of all arable land on earth are used to grow food for livestock. Wow. So talk about like- Land, water, resources, time, labor, etc. It is a phenomenal amount that we spend as a society, as a planet, to grow wheat, corn, soy, to then feed our animals. For a poultry farmer, for a chicken farmer.
If they look at their emissions, 60% of their emissions is the feed that they buy. The rest is what happens on the farm. But 60% is the feed that they're buying. So by buying our new recycled feed... They're actually buying a carbon negative feed ingredient that kind of neutralizes all the other emissions from the feed that they bought otherwise. Hmm.
Okay, so let's break down some of the other aspects of it. It is a subscription pricing service that includes the ship back for chicken feed, right? Right. It's an all-included service. So the bin is included. Shipping is included. Any replacement charcoal filters, it has a charcoal filter built in the product to make sure there are no smells. Those are all included. Support, warranty, everything you need to run this service is included in that kind of monthly fee.
What can go in mill and what cannot? Let's get like a little bit nuts and bolts here. You could put anything that you can eat in the mill. Okay. Meat, coffee grounds, all of it. All food. Meat, dairy, coffee grounds. Throw it all in there. The only food you can't put in there is like a lamb shank, like a really thick.
bone of beef or lamb. The bone probably shouldn't go in there, but chicken bones, fish bones, all okay. Literally all food could go in this. You can also, side note, you could also put the... output of your mill device in your green bin if you have.
Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. If you have a green bin, mill food grounds could go into it. If you're a composter, if you've got a backyard pile or a tumbler, this could go in your tumbler. And actually, if you have chickens, actually like 9% of Americans have chickens at home.
You could feed this to your chickens too. I have, I read a whole thing about... I think in Finland, like they gave everybody chickens during the pandemic and it had this sort of unexpected side effect of reducing food waste by a truly astonishing amount. It's like a double whammy. This is how things used to work. This is how things used to work in pre-urban society. We had chickens, we had pigs, and what we didn't eat would go to feed them. We didn't have food.
This is really a phenomenon of our ultra-industrial and urban society. We've made it really hard otherwise. So yeah, exactly. If you've got backyard chickens or you're a gardener, you could totally use this stuff at home too. Got it. And then who, like who are the chicken farmers? Like who's buying it?
And how did you make those deals? Was it like lots of chicken field trips? I just want to know everything. Oh, my gosh. There were a lot of chicken field trips, actually. Our first farmer is in the Pacific Northwest and runs like a midsize farm. A lot of free range birds. And actually it's cool. It's like that. Their farm looks a lot like the photos that we took for our marketing.
It's like one of those idyllic farms where the chickens are running around. It's a really good farm partner. And they're excited because, yeah, again, they're looking to decarbonize their operations. And feed is a key component to that. Right. What is making them look to decarbonize their operations? Like, are there starting to be requirements and reasons that this is a business pressure that will...
I'm just sort of thinking about scale and how much chicken feed could potentially be replaced and food waste could be replaced and what are the levers that make that. More and more so these days, consumers want climate smart solutions. And when they're in the grocery store and they see a carton of eggs that says climate neutral versus the one that doesn't, they'll buy the one that says carbon neutral.
or climate positive or climate smart, folks are really interested in doing the right thing, especially if it's the same price. In this case, like... We were going to throw the food away. There's a lot of value to that. And it'd be a shame to throw that food away. Much better to recover it. But consumers are asking for it. This is what's going to drive the change. Government regulations are actually more of a lagging indicator.
of something that's already existing and working. Right. And that's actually also part of Mill's theory of change that, yes, like we're going direct to consumer and building a new service for consumers at home. That is going to drive systems change because if we're demonstrating that this is working in thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of homes.
Okay, time for a quick break. When we come back, more on how a drop becomes a flood, that road toward mass adoption. Also, how Matt became a climate entrepreneur in the first place after all that time at Apple. And the thing you probably want to know, which is how sustainable the... device really is. Got the idea? You've planned it all through. This start-up needs starting. The next move is you. With support from NatWest and this thought we impart.
You could do great things. Don't wait. Just start. With a range of accounts, including our Metal Mobile account, no other British bank has helped more businesses get started than NatWest. Transcription by CastingWords Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. I'm talking with Matt Rogers, the co-founder of the Nest Smart Thermostat and now co-founder of Mill, which is taking on food waste at home for now.
I sort of left us hanging on that question though of mass adoption. So is the hope that Mill will start to be the, it will be the aspirational part of this and then it could be something that. municipalities start to do and like if look if you can afford it you have the pretty in-home version but the value is so clear that there becomes sort of a mass behavior change yeah
Exactly. So we're starting to build this new system. And the parallels to what we did at Nest are pretty clear. So actually, I'll draw the parallel. So at Nest, we started direct-to-consumer with a premium, expensive product that people said, oh my gosh, $250 for a thermostat.
And over time, as we proved the model, More and more energy companies would say, hey, we're going to give you a rebate for Nest Thermostat to save energy and to be part of a smart grid and to turn down when energy is really expensive. In most cities and regions in the country, you can get an S for almost free between the rebates and the incentives, energy companies, et cetera.
So what we're doing with Mill is we're building that consumer service that is awesome and better, better for you and better for the planet. and going to prove to our cities, to our municipalities. that this is better than what we're doing before. And we've actually even started a few of those pilots already. We've got a pilot going in Tacoma, Washington right now. And Tacoma is a city that's been doing everything right. They have a green bin for food.
And we're already seeing that our Tacoma pilot participants are participating more than what came before. Half of the folks in our pilot didn't even use their green bin before. At all. Wow. The first time they're ever using a food recycling service is now with Mill. And they've had a green bin for 10 years.
And that I think is a really important thing to note because sometimes when I talk about these solutions, you know, I am a big believer, again, in adoption driving mass change. And adoption starts expensive. And also the knock on some solutions like this is like, well, okay, that's great. This is what rich people can do. And it won't. It won't become a mass solution or can't.
You're spot on. This is where you start. And I was an early adopter of electric vehicles. I had a Tesla Roadster that was, God, like $110,000, a crazy amount of money at the time. And it didn't have a lot of range. And it didn't have brakes that worked when the battery was fully charged. Fun. And, you know, it's one of those things. But I wanted a great new EV that was a better car than what I had. And now you could buy an EV for $30,000.
And there are rebates and all these other things that help support that growth. But someone's got to get the ball started and prove the technology works. You know, the same is true in solar. Solar used to be so expensive. So, so expensive. And now like you'd be foolish to not have solar. Like, you know, solar is cheaper.
Yeah. How did you, you mentioned at the top that you and your wife have been longtime climate evangelists. How did you talk to me about your journey? Like, how did you come to this and what got you so passionate about it? My wife and I have been working on this together a really long time. My wife and I even campaigned for Al Gore back in 2000. We've been doing this together a really long time. We weren't married then. We were still kids, actually. Honestly,
Al Gore and the Inconvenient Truth was a huge inspiration for me and for us. It's one of the things that got me off my butt to start Nest. I was working at Apple at the time, building the biggest products in humanity, like the iPhone. left to take a bet on a thermostat yeah like we don't have a lot of time and this is one where you know there's a lot of doom and gloom out there of like hey like we've got nine years left but to really turn the tide here
And I'm an optimist. I think we really can do it. But it's going to take motivated folks who are spending their time, their money, their energy. to push towards more solutions out there. And I've dedicated my life to do it. It's both like my business. It's also what I do in my personal life. It's like voting. You got to do it. And if everyone does it, it's really going to matter. And that's what ends up moving the needle for governments.
Yeah, and not for nothing, you also have to vote people for climate forward candidates for crying out loud. That's right. It matters. And then finally, there's this question of what is actually sustainable. Like if everybody buys a new gadget and that gadget involves mailing stuff back and forth, is it really better?
First of all, it's a good thing to note that unlike even a service like Ridwell, which we talked about a few weeks back, the mail pickup is not a different delivery schedule. It's regular old USPS, which is already coming to your house rain or shine. And says Matt. We also have an LCA, our lifecycle analysis. So if you go to mill.com slash LCA, you can see and learn that a mill household can save a half a ton of emissions per year.
So even with the shipping and the manufacturing and the energy it uses, this is a very... carbon negative process. And it's very good for the plant. And sometimes it's a little counterintuitive, like, oh, like, how can it possibly be good to put my food grounds in a box and have someone come pick it up in the mail? It's like, it's that important to keep it out of the trash.
If you're interested, you can find Mill at mill.com. Matt says there's a pretty good story in how they got that amazing domain. So we'll have to have him back to hear that. There's also a competitor called Lomi spelled L-O-M-I, which processes food overnight. and then you take that to your own compost bin or your yard or whatever, that's $499 without a monthly subscription or $399 plus $20 a month to keep filters and things coming. We'll have a couple of comparison articles in the related link.
But if nothing else, let the mind-blowing awareness of how big a carbon emitter food waste is inspire you to waste less food. Or maybe get a little IKEA bin for the counter. Or maybe some chickens. This is a huge action you can take to make a big difference. And it's something that's part of your life. Two, three, four times a day. Food, eating. Pay attention.
All right, that's it for everybody in the pool. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. You can find my newsletter at mollywood.co and email your thoughts, reactions and ideas to in. at everybodyinthepool.com. And remember, together, we can get this done. See you next week. At Matalan, we've got the perfect treat for the upcoming bank holiday with 20% off a £40 spend for Matalan Me members. Is it time for a little payday treat?
Shop in-store or visit matterland.co.uk to access your discount. T's and C's apply. Include sale. As you're listening to me, Daisy, Apple's iPhone disassembly robot is dismantling an iPhone into lots of recyclable parts. That's how Apple recovers more materials than conventional recycling methods. Thanks, Daisy. There's more to iPhone.