- Well, I think if I got one of these for my house, I could cancel my gym membership.

So this is the inside of a horse?

This is not what I expected a horse to look like.

- Horse is actually an acronym.

- What does it stand for?

- It stands for high-solids organic-waste recycling system with electrical output.

- I can see why you shortened it to H.O.R.S.E.

So can you tell me what happens in this space.

- So the H.O.R.S.E.

is this living system.

We convert food scraps into fertilizer and energy.

Nothing's wasted, zero waste.

- So how does it work?

- So we're gonna give you our tricycle.

It's a cargo tricycle.

- The future is now.

(bicycle horn beeps) Whee.

- [Jan] We pick up food waste at restaurants and breweries.

We bring it back here to feed the machine.

You actually dump the food waste into a chute.

- Yum, lunch.

- [Jan] And we have a large, it's like a meat grinder.

- You know, if this weren't getting turned into fuel, I might just make myself a salad right now.

- [Jan] It sort of chews things up.

- I worked out this week.

I got it.

- [Jan] We can do protein and fat.

- So you could do bodies.

- We could do, well we could.

- You could do bodies, maybe next year.

- Yeah, maybe next year.

And then, right below us is a mixing pump.

- Really brings me back to my days on the farm.

Farmville is what I'm talking about.

- And that pumps and circulates the food and the microbes together.

It's 30 days in here.

- It's a very slow digestive system.

- It is, the microbes just naturally make renewable natural gas.

We make electricity out of the gas.

You can plug your Nissan Leaf into it, your electric bike, or we could power food trucks even with this.

And then the tank behind me is the liquid fertilizer.

So everything is inside this box.

We've really worked hard to make it compatible with urban settings.

- Yeah, it looks like a tiny home, but covered in space blankets.

- Yeah.

- And with weirder furniture.

- Yeah, that's what we were trying to do is miniaturize something that has always been big and now it's miniature.

There are lots of big digesters, but you have to $5 million dollars or $50 million dollars.

- If I wanted to get one of these, how much would it set me back?

- It's about the cost of a Tesla.

- Alright, well I could just park it next to my Tesla.

- Yeah, that's right, yep.

Pretty good burgers.

- What do we do with our organic waste now.

If your organic waste doesn't go to the H.O.R.S.E, where does it go?

- Well, on a national basis, it's landfilling or incineration.

A lot of the West Coast cities and Northeast cities, there's composting, but that generally involves a dumpster, a truck, hauling it to somebody else's community.

In this case, we're trying to minimize or eliminate trucks.

These zero waste and generate valuable commodities within a one or two-mile radius.

We're at a brewery here today.

- So what I always say is there is no such thing as garbage, just resources out of place.

And we produce a lot of resources left over from the brewing process.

- (coughs) - Yeah a little dusty.

- The spent yeast out of the brewery is.

It's amazing.

It's got a lot of gas potential.

We feed the H.O.R.S.E.

twice a week and then the machine runs itself.

When you look at who's inquiring, it tends to be islands and campuses whether they're corporate, government, college campuses.

We've exported a couple kits to Sri Lanka and the Philippines.

- What's your grand vision to this?

How is this gonna save the world?

- You've got wind and solar, you've got some tidal stuff going on.

This is a whole new category that is starting to be talked about, this bio-energy space.

We're trying to democratize this, make it affordable, simple, and it lets people be more self-reliant or more energy-independent.

- Nothing like an e-bike ride in the morning.

- [Jan] It's a bit of a miracle that you can take something that's really ugly and smelly and problem and you can convert it into something commercially valuable.

- It looks like mud but the smell is actually sorta pleasant.

It smells like Thanksgiving.

It's actually pretty, I would eat this.

It's nicely analog, like I'm not pressing a button here.

I'm not looking at a screen.

It's just like good old-fashioned labor which I'm an expert at.

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