The Problem
Every day, hotels and restaurants throw away huge amounts of food waste. Most of it ends up rotting in landfills, producing methane and polluting waterways.
At the same time, smallholder farmers are being squeezed by rising prices for animal feed and fertilizer two things that are essential to their livelihoods, and increasingly out of reach.
Two problems. One connects to the other.
What RegenFeed Does
RegenFeed is a circular-economy platform we built at the GreenTech Hackathon that closes that loop.
- Hotels and restaurants list their organic food waste instead of throwing it away.
- Waste collectors pick it up and deliver it to a bioconversion process.
- That waste is transformed into two valuable products: high-protein animal feed and organic bio-fertilizer both usable by the same farming communities who've been priced out of the commercial alternatives.
It's a simple idea with a real environmental and economic payoff: less waste in landfills, cheaper inputs for farmers, and a new income stream for the people doing the collecting.
Why Bitcoin Lightning
One of the biggest reasons circular-economy models like this stall in practice is payment friction. Waste collectors are often informal workers, sometimes without easy access to a bank account, and every day of delay between doing the work and getting paid makes the whole system less reliable.
We wanted collectors to get paid the moment their contribution is confirmed — not at the end of the week, not after paperwork, not after a bank transfer clears.
That's why RegenFeed settles collector payouts over the Bitcoin Lightning Network. Lightning gives us near-instant, low-fee micropayments which matters a lot when you're paying out small, frequent amounts to a lot of individual collectors rather than a handful of large transactions. It's the difference between "you'll get paid eventually" and "you got paid right now."
Why We're Keeping the Details Close
We're still early, and this is a live, evolving project so we're intentionally not publishing the technical architecture, the payment logic, or the internal build here. If you're curious about the mechanics, the best way to see it in action is the live demo below.
Try It
🔗 Live demo: regenfeed.onrender.com
We'd love feedback from anyone working on circular-economy models, sustainable agriculture, or Bitcoin/Lightning payments drop a comment if this is a space you're building in too.
Built at zone01kisumu during
GreenTech Hackathon 2026.
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