ELI BRAMBOROVA ShareWaste
EMBRACING THE HEART OF COMMUNITY SPIRIT, ELI BRAMBOROVA CREATED THE APP SHAREWASTE WITH HER PARTNER, TOMÁŠ, TO CONNECT UNWANTED FOOD SCRAPS WITH HUNGRY COMPOSTERS.
ShareWaste grew from the idea of reducing our waste at home and getting to know the local community more. We realised how hard it is to get to know anybody if you move into an apartment in a busy urban area. After several months, we hardly knew anyone where we lived; in our building, people moved in and then out a few months later. We were also upset by the amount of compostable material ending up in our garbage bin and decided to offer our food scraps online. A local gardener was keen to have them and we started thinking of ways to improve the sharing system. That’s when the idea of the app was born – we didn’t have our families and friends in the area, which left us with some free time. Our plan was to build an app that would help more people connect with their neighbours and start turning their food scraps and other organics into rich soil.
Many people are in the same situation as us. They live in a city and can’t have their own compost bin. Some of them have always lived in such a set-up and their gardening experience is minimal. Being able to connect with a local compost host is also an opportunity to see how people grow food or keep chickens in the city. Just by experiencing how things are done and seeing that it’s easier than they thought can encourage people to start composting at home when they can.
When people moved to cities and offices, they lost their natural connection to the land and the skills of how to look after it and regenerate it. When I was a child, my grandfather would always run on the road when there was a horse cart passing by because he knew there would be free manure
