The Food Cycle Fix

A teenager notices her food waste attracts flies and ends up feeding her fish and chickens

In the sleepy town of Greenvale, 16-year-old Mia Torres was tired of watching her family’s kitchen scraps pile up in the compost bin. The smell, the flies, the hassle—it was too much. An aspiring tinkerer with a knack for robotics and a passion for sustainability, Mia decided to tackle the problem head-on. Inspired by a biology class lecture on black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) and their ability to devour organic waste, she had a wild idea: an automated food recycler that turned scraps into protein-packed larva for her neighbor’s chickens and her own fish tank.


Mia’s garage became her lab. She scavenged parts from old appliances, thrift store finds, and her dad’s toolbox. The core of her invention was a modified conveyor belt from a broken treadmill, paired with a 3D-printed chute system she designed using free software. She programmed an Arduino microcontroller to automate the process, adding sensors to monitor temperature and humidity—key for keeping the larvae happy. A salvaged plastic drum served as the digestion chamber, where the larvae would munch through food waste.


The setup was simple but ingenious. Food scraps went into a hopper at one end, shredded by a repurposed blender blade. The shredded waste dropped into the drum, where a colony of black soldier fly larvae, sourced from a local entomology lab, went to work. The larvae consumed the waste, converting it into nutrient-rich frass (larva poop) and their own plump bodies. After a week, an automated gate—triggered by a timer—released mature larvae through a chute. A flip of a switch sent them either to a collection bin for her neighbor’s chicken coop or directly into a small aquaponics tank where Mia’s tilapia waited eagerly.


The first test run was a mess. Mia dumped in a mix of vegetable peels, coffee grounds, and leftover pasta. The larvae loved it, but the drum overheated, and the smell was... intense. She tweaked the ventilation, adding a small fan and a charcoal filter. By the third try, the system ran smoothly. In went a bucket of scraps; out came a steady stream of larvae and frass. The chickens went nuts for the larvae, and the tilapia thrived, their waste fertilizing a small basil crop in the aquaponics setup.


Word spread. Her neighbor, Mr. Jenkins, started bringing his scraps over, amazed at how the larvae fattened his hens. Mia’s science teacher entered her project in a regional STEM fair, where it caught the eye of a local startup focused on sustainable agriculture. They offered her a summer internship to scale up the design.


Mia’s recycler wasn’t just a gadget—it was a closed-loop system, turning waste into food for animals and plants. She named it the “CycleSnack 3000,” mostly as a joke, but the name stuck. By summer, she was dreaming bigger: a community-wide network of recyclers, feeding local farms and urban gardens. For now, though, she was happy watching her tilapia gobble up larvae and her neighbor’s chickens cluck in delight.