As part of the Edge 50 list, Apolitical is publishing a series of articles exploring a selection of these bold initiatives to learn more about the stories and strategies behind them.

Created by Apolitical in partnership with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation, this list is an invitation to look beyond the usual playbook and ask what becomes possible when governments are willing to think boldly about today's biggest problems.

Apolitical spoke to Ankita Vijayvergiya, Co-founder of BillionCarbon, a start-up using micro- and macro-organisms, such as fly larvae, to transform food waste management.

Most food waste solutions focus on disposal. BillionCarbon starts from a different premise: that nature spent billions of years perfecting a food-to-soil loop, and that industrialisation broke it. Using fly larvae and microbes, the process restores that loop, reducing waste by up to 95% in three days and turning what remains into organic fertiliser and protein-rich insect feed.

When you came up with the idea for BillionCarbon, what challenge were you trying to address, and how did your understanding of that challenge change once you began?

Before COVID, I was working for a big company. When the pandemic started, I had a bit of a wake-up call. I started to reflect on what I really wanted to spend my time on. I thought back to a book a professor had given me when I was at the London Business School called The 100‑Year Life. The book talks about the idea that people will have multiple careers throughout their lives. It made me think: Am I ready for my second career now? I had always known that climate would be my second career. The only question was when. So I started researching where we are as a society, where we need to be and the gap that exists. Initially, that led me to create programmes designed to help individuals adopt more sustainable lifestyles. At that time, my current co-founder also quit their job and joined my mission. We ran three programmes: sustainable menstruation, plastics and home composting, and created an app to gamify everything.

Across those programmes, we measured impact, and it became clear that the composting programme (essentially the one focusing on food waste) was having the biggest climate impact with the least effort. That insight pushed us to focus entirely on food waste.

As engineers, we originally thought we could build a platform to aggregate everyone working on sustainable food waste treatment, generate carbon credits from their collective impact and pass extra income back to them. This would have let us stay focused on the tech side. But when we researched the landscape, we quickly realised there were very few people treating food waste properly. That's precisely why food waste remains such a big source of emissions. It was in this moment that we thought: we need to find a solution for this. We need to get our hands dirty and develop a new approach to food waste management ourselves. If not us, then who? That's how the journey to BillionCarbon began. We spent two years in research and development, and product development, then started commercial deployment in 2025.

Can you walk us through BillionCarbon's approach and what happens during each part of the process?

BillionCarbon offers a commercial-grade, 3-day-precision food waste treatment solution. It's designed for bulk waste generators, so large organisations that produce over 100kg of waste a day. BillionCarbon's technology combines two elements: biology and industrial engineering. I'll talk about biology first. When we started, we went back to nature. We studied the natural processes of digestion and solid‑state fermentation.

"The question we asked was simple: if humans can digest and excrete food in a day, why can't we automate a similar process for food waste in cities?"

After conducting thousands of controlled experiments with research scientists, we developed a consortium of micro‑ and macro‑organisms that can help do just that. As for the second element, industrial engineering, we engineered a four‑chamber bioreactor that accelerates this natural process at a low cost. The reactor is micro‑climate controlled and requires no electricity.

We designed the operational model to be intentionally scalable and efficient. Waste is shredded, segregated and loaded daily into the bioreactor. The auto-process then kicks in, powered entirely by micro- and macro-organisms. Outputs are harvested periodically: a liquid bio‑stimulant comes out once a week, and a solid compost roughly once a month. This means food waste goes in every day, but nothing needs to be removed daily, which makes it far easier to scale in dense urban environments. This is far better than existing sustainable food waste management solutions. Composting, for example, is very slow and requires a lot of space. Organic waste composter machines and biogas are costly to set up and produce smelly, dirty sludge every day. By removing these challenges, our solution is much easier to scale in cities.

Using micro- and macro-organisms to tackle food waste isn't necessarily an obvious solution. At what point did you realise this could become an effective approach?

Over billions of years, nature has already perfected the food‑to‑soil loop, in which food returns to the soil, nutrients are replenished, and the soil regenerates food for everyone to consume. As we were researching, we realised that 150 years of industrialisation had broken that loop. Today, the food system is linear: we produce food, consume it, and then send the waste to landfill. That results in nutrient loss and emissions. This is when we realised the importance of learning from nature. In nature, food waste isn't treated as waste; it's seen as recycling of nutrients. Insects, microbes and other organisms play a central role in recycling nutrients. That insight led us to test, with the help of scientists, whether those natural processes could be replicated in controlled urban systems. As I explained earlier, we conducted thousands of experiments to narrow down which organisms worked best. That work builds on hundreds of existing research papers.

The moment we saw 90% biomass reduction consistently, we knew this wasn't just interesting science; it could be viable infrastructure. To break down what that means: if 100 kilograms of food waste enters the system, only around 10 kilograms remain. And that 10kg includes useful outputs like biofertiliser. Existing approaches typically only reduce waste by about 50%, which still leaves large volumes of material to handle.

Did you encounter resistance or scepticism when introducing this approach?

Yes, quite a lot. Whenever you attempt something that hasn't been done before, resistance is inevitable. One source of scepticism came from the simple fact that we work with food waste, which many people see as dirty or unpleasant. Another concern was the use of biological processes rather than more visible technologies, like incineration. But, despite being more visible, incineration produces more emissions and isn't as effective at recovering nutrients.

We addressed this resistance with transparency, performance data and by demonstrating outcomes. We also introduced strict operational guidelines to ensure workers remain healthy and safe. Today, many of our sites resemble food‑processing facilities more than waste‑treatment plants. Shifting perceptions in this way has been an important milestone. Running pilots and inviting regulators to observe, learn and share feedback also helped us overcome scepticism from risk-averse government stakeholders.

We also ran a pro bono project with the Bhopal municipality around three years ago. Over six months, we collected and treated vegetable market waste generated daily by hundreds of vendors using our three-day precision technology. The resulting fertiliser was redistributed to local farmers, closing the loop between urban waste and agricultural production.

How did you personally stay motivated throughout those challenges?

A lot of it comes from conviction. All three of us co-founders are deeply passionate about climate. We're also all engineers. That means we approach problems with an engineering mindset. When we encounter an obstacle, we treat it as a challenge to be solved rather than a failure. For example, none of us are biologists. But we saw that as an opportunity to build connections with scientists and collaborate. Seeing real outcomes on the ground is also incredibly motivating. When we see the climate impact we are creating and hear feedback from workers and partners, that validation keeps us moving forward.

What early signals have shown that BillionCarbon's approach is having an impact?

Our long‑term goal is to mitigate one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent and to create 100,000 climate jobs by 2030. That lofty ambition inspired our name, 'BillionCarbon'.

"So far, we've processed around four million kilograms of food waste and mitigated two million kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions. We also maintain a workforce that is 50% women."

Another unexpected impact has been improvements in worker health. Everyone knows that conditions for waste workers across the world can be abysmal. But one of our workers, who previously operated an organic waste composter, told us he used to take three or four sick days each month. After moving to our system, he reports taking basically none. That means he's getting paid more, too. These kinds of stories show that climate innovation can also improve livelihoods.

What have you learned about innovating in this sector that you didn't anticipate?

Building the technology is only the first step, and often the easiest. You can develop it inside a lab. The difficult part is designing the business model and bringing the technology to market. That requires constant iteration. You need to understand who your customers are, who will pay for the solution and how the model will scale.

There aren't many existing models for us to replicate in climate infrastructure. We have had to build that approach from scratch. The one thing I'd tell myself looking back is that the hard part is still coming.

What advice would you give a public servant or civic leader who wants to support similar innovations?

Firstly, think in terms of systems rather than individual pilots or projects. Cities, for example, are entire systems. They're living metabolisms. When we import food and export waste to the peripheries of our cities as landfill, we're not thinking about how the whole system will react or evolve in the years to come. Policies and innovations should be designed with long‑term system outcomes in mind, and we should measure outcomes, not the effort put in. Measuring nutrient recovery, or how much food waste you've been able to treat, is much better than just ticking a box to say you have set up a machine.

Secondly, policy and innovation must work together. If you create a policy without innovation to back it or implement it, it's just a piece of paper. Conversely, if you have innovation without supportive policy, the innovation can't go to market or scale. Sometimes policy lags behind innovation. For example, in food waste, the government subsidises capital investments to set up heavy machinery for treating food waste, but not for operations. So people are more incentivised to buy really heavy machinery, which is less effective and less sustainable.

"Policy must create safe spaces where innovators can test, experiment and iterate."

Ultimately, the future of cities won't be defined by how efficiently we dispose of waste but by how intelligently we circulate the nutrients. We need to start looking at cities as living, circular ecosystems, rather than importing food and exporting waste.