I am not accustomed to linking up the words technology and love in one sentence, but my appreciation of the Smart Cara (www.smartcaraeurope.com) which sits on a work service in my kitchen and in three hours reduces a bin load of food waste to a powdery nutrient rich garden manure, has won my devotion.

I’ve tried composting food but never got beyond having a load of sludgy smelly manure that seems to take up a lot of space. While my council does not collect food waste and even if it did chances are it would end up in landfill.

Once there, it is a killer for the environment. The Love Food website tells how in the UK, we discard a total of almost one million tonnes of food waste – milk, bread ,potatoes and so on, every year .

Our landfills are filling up with rotting food, where it can take many years to degrade completely and meanwhile emits a horrifying amount of methane gas. That’s because in landfills, organic materials, like food scraps, are broken down by bacteria to produce methane. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and it has a warming potential of 21 times that of carbon dioxide. In 2011, for example, the waste sector accounted for 3.1% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the UK .

So imagine if this vast food waste mass could be reduced by up to 90% in just three hours in the place where it is collected, and turned into a powder manure needing no chemicals, so that collection and depositing of waste food is done away with and you have the product for your plants .

It took the team at Smart Cara, a Korean design agency with an environmental brief, ten years to to get from having the lightbulb moment to producing a low-watt electric machine the Smart Cara into which you put your household waste with no need to keep it in a waste container first. Turn it on and after three hours of steam drying and churning, you open the lid and – hey presto! – there is a fine powder ready to be removed. Smart Cara won a Ministry of Trade award in Korea and is now selling in the UK, where it is winning admirers apart from me. The author of a testimonial on Zerowaste Week blog:

“I’ve seen some serious greenwashing in my time of living a sustainable lifestyle. But sometimes a product comes along that really makes you sit up and take notice “.

So where is the catch? Well the price if not a catch could be a deterrent. The Smart Cara price tag is £399 so you have to calculate what a no-odour , clean and instant processing of food waste is worth to you alongside the obvious benefits it offers the environment. One idea would be to team up with a few people in your community and share use of one.

Better still would be to persuade councils to install Smart Cara’s in their localities so that, as will re-cycling bins, we could take our food waste along and the dried manure could be given to local allotments, gardens and urban farms.