"We'll dig a kilometer down into the ground to get some gold — because we're mining for a resource. But there's a resource we're just throwing away."
Food waste generates 2.6 times the greenhouse gas emissions of the entire global airline industry, yet only 5-6% of it is ever composted. Tobias built Shiva Industries to treat that gap as an opportunity, not a chore.
"A lot of the technologies are masquerading as digesters, but really they're just big microwaves — they're just dehydrators."
No live microbes in, no microbes out — and pathogens like E. coli and salmonella can go dormant in the dried-out output and reactivate once it hits soil. Shiva's proprietary strain of thermophilic microbes does real aerobic digestion instead: any organic matter in, third-party-verified nutrient-dense soil out, in 24 hours.
"We got this elephant poop — it stinks — and it was a 13-hour digestion. The output was just this beautiful, humic, dark, living soil."
"Will It Digest" is Shiva's running series stress-testing the machine on the strangest inputs the team can find — Mason Elephant Park dung, a river-cleanup haul with Sungai Watch, even an accidental chemical dump — to show skeptics what real digestion can handle.
"We've spent quite a lot of time with a group of farmers up in Singaraja — they call our digestate magic dirt."
Field trials pitting Shiva's digestate against chemical fertilizer and untreated control beds are what turned a skeptical farming community into believers — the same pattern now playing out with hotel owners as Bali's landfills close.
"Go and break a sweat for somebody else — it's incredible what that time does to you, and it's not for the benefit of you."
After nearly 20 years in Singapore's advertising and digital-tech world, Tobias started doing beach and river cleanups in Bali with his kids. That instinct led to aerobic digestion, and eventually to a factory in Denpasar and machines running across four Indonesian islands.
Food waste generates 2.6 times the greenhouse gas emissions of the entire global airline industry — and yet only 5-6% of it ever gets composted. Tobias Wilson calls that number "the gold we're throwing away."
Tobias spent nearly two decades in Singapore's advertising, marketing and digital-tech world before something started to feel missing. He began doing beach and river cleanups in Bali with his kids — "go and break a sweat for somebody else," he says, "it's incredible what that time does to you, and it's not for the benefit of you." That instinct led him to aerobic digestion, and eventually to founding Shiva Industries: a Bali-based team building on-site rapid composters that turn food and organic waste into nutrient-dense soil in 24 hours, not the 3-9 months traditional composting takes.
We go deep on why most "composters" on the market are really just mechanical dehydrators wearing a green label — no live microbes in, no microbes out, and pathogens that can go dormant and reactivate once they hit soil — versus Shiva's proprietary strain of thermophilic microbes doing real aerobic digestion. Tobias walks through "Will It Digest," the series where his team stress-tests the machine on the strangest inputs they can find: 13 hours on elephant dung from Mason Elephant Park, a river-cleanup haul with Sungai Watch that included a dead duck, a chicken, a koi and a rat, even an accidental mop-bucket chemical dump. We talk unit economics — a two-year payback period and roughly 500 million rupiah in annual savings at just one ton of throughput a day — and the forces (payback, regulation, brand, staff morale) that are finally turning holdout hotel owners into buyers now that Bali's landfills are closing. Shiva has grown to machines running across 4 Indonesian islands, diverting more than 2 million kilograms of waste from landfill every year — with papaya farmers in Singaraja nicknaming the byproduct "magic dirt."
This one is for anyone who has ever looked at an "unglamorous" industry and wondered if the real opportunity was hiding in what everyone else calls trash.
Shiva Industries & Tobias — Highlights & Impact:
→ Turns food and organic waste into nutrient-dense soil in 24 hours, versus 3-9 months for traditional composting
→ Machines running across 4 Indonesian islands, diverting 2,000,000+ kg of waste from landfill every year
→ Factory in Denpasar, Bali scaling production, quality control and delivery
→ ~2-year payback period and ~500M rupiah in annual savings for a business running one ton of waste a day
→ Used by hotels, resorts, restaurants, food processors, mining operations, schools and local government programs across Bali and Indonesia