Olympia Yarger reckons that she is onto something big. But there is plenty of hard work ahead, and her start-up business, Goterra, is anything but glamorous. It involves collecting food waste in converted shipping containers that contain thousands of hungry maggots - the larvae of flies.
She invented an autonomous machine, tended by a robot inside each container, which moves the waste around and keeps the process running. What emerges are two very useful products: high-value fertiliser and protein for feeding farm animals. Her invention ticks many boxes when it comes to the circular economy, a term which involves sharing, leasing, reusing and recycling materials for as long as possible to address climate change.
“It started as a very self-serving exercise,” explains Yarger. “I wanted to go back to farming. I had started doing that out of high school, and I wanted to return to the
