By Sabby Kainth

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The garburator has become a staple found across North American homes despite being banned throughout most of the world. In my own house, it has become routine to flip the switch and hear the deafening gurgle of our garburator swallowing yet another fork into a mangled mess. Beyond their silverware flattening abilities, garburators have been one of the worst things to happen to our wastewater industry. Food waste that solidifies in pipes drastically increases the chance of clogs. This is not only inconvenient for homeowners but causes over half of sanitary sewer overflows. The garburator is an all-around nightmare for municipality workers. One thing is clear, tossing your organics in the compost is better than sending them down the pipes. That is if one is willing to become nose blind to the odor and monstrous fruit flies that will inevitably accompany kitchen top compost bins.

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Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation. This was true for Victor Nicolov, a mechanical engineer, and entrepreneur from Victoria who created Sepura. A smart composting device, the Sepura Home system tucks away under the sink and separates organic waste from liquids in the first eco-friendly food waste disposal system. The device stores organic waste in its odorless bin, combining the “down the sink” convenience of a disposal machine with the eco-friendliness of a compost bin. The best part? No mangled silverware or fruit flies.

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Victor, who was born in Montreal says he remembers little of the city other than his memories of a red brick house. Along with his family, he moved to British Columbia at a young age and considers Victoria as the place where he “grew up”. Bonds formed in adolescence have a profound impact on our lives. Victor credits his high school friends with playing a role in his desire to invent. For him the people who surrounded him were greatly influential, “we were always motivating each other, we were a group of 4–5 kids who just wanted to do something, we didn’t know what but we wanted to start up our own business. We are still friends and two of us are fully in the startup scene.” His college days at UVic certainly fed his insatiable desire for an environment high in energy “I love the school setting, the university, the campus, walking around and feeling that energy. It’s like a false sense of opportunity and hope. When you graduate, real-life crushes you but it’s good energy even though it may be too optimistic. It motivates you.” For Victor, whether it was in high school or university it was about the people and the energy that he surrounded himself with.

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Victor was in his last year of undergrad at UVic when he came up with the idea that would develop into Sepura. He noticed many problems with the traditional garbage disposal systems, technology that he notes which hasn’t seen an update in decades. “We are getting told to save our food scraps, we are told to put it in a bucket and then the city comes and picks it up but nobody wants to do that? It smells, it’s messy, you have to go out with your bucket and no one wants to look at it. And then the alternative, the garburator, sends it down the drain. It could be used to make soil and generate energy but it’s going down the drain. I was noticing problems with my own food grinder at home. I ran into so many issues using it. You can’t throw bones in there and when you drop a fork in, ahh good luck. In movies they show it as the guy shoves his hand in and it just totally rips his arm. It’s an old tech that hasn’t changed in decades and decades. I was lucky enough to have the tools at my university to create a better solution.”

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As I sit down to talk with Victor over video chat on a chilly November day amid a global pandemic, I am struck by what a deeply optimistic person he is. He nonchalantly mentions how he’s worked through 50–70 iterations of the product’s design with constant 3D printing. A resourceful individual, Victor identified a problem and like a true mechanical engineer began constructing a solution. Victor mentions an early prototype of Sepura Home “it was super sketchy, I used a hand drill and rewired circuits to get the right amps and voltage. I threw a bunch of food in there and it worked until the whole thing snapped and it took a leg off the wooden structure it was on and it was spinning crazily. It flipped the breaker. I had tomato sauce and lettuce all over the walls and ceiling. I broke a lot of things to see what it could do.”

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There are many hurdles entrepreneurs out of university face but Victor seems to have taken them all in stride. He mentions that in class there was always something to fall back on and graduating and starting working on his business full time was a scary experience. He laughs as he says “typically you pay for a lawyer, an accountant. I had no money so I had to figure it all out myself. It’s not what you’d think it would be. I thought it would be 80% product design but slowly you start to back away and it becomes running a business and the development of the product becomes a job for your employees. That was a big change and I had never taken a business class before.” Victor remembers the early days of starting Anvy Technologies and the support he received, “I had a ton of help with the Coast Capital Innovation centre at UVic. They were able to give me my first office, which was really cool. Nice little cubicle, we even had a window and that’s when I hired my first employee as a co-op student. You could say that was my first real sense of responsibility.”

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I ask Victor what he believes are three skills that are crucial to becoming a good entrepreneur. He asks if being overly optimistic counts as a skill. I reassure him that it certainly does, and having learned more about him during our chat it’s evident to me that this optimism has carried him forward. Other skills Victor mentions are organization and perseverance. “I think passion fades a lot over time and during hard times you won’t always have the passion but the ones that make it are the ones that keep going. So I think perseverance is crucial.” He, however, does not believe there is a pattern or formula to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Learning from his journey, Victor encourages inventors to take an idea and put it in the hands of someone other than themselves as soon as possible. A measure he believes saves a great deal of time. “As an engineer, we want to perfect things before we let someone else try it. Put it in the hands of someone else because it’ll be different than how you, as the creator, use it. I already know the answer, I know how I want people to use it but that’s not how they will actually use it. If you’ve got something someone can try out, do that! The feedback you’ll receive is priceless. And in the end I’m selling it, so the customer needs to enjoy the experience of using it.”

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Victor didn’t go about creating Sepura to be an environmentally friendly product. His primary goal was always to create a product that would make getting rid of crude organic waste at home easier. Eco-friendliness, he considers a bonus. He believes “it solves the problem for municipalities and then whether they want to or not they end up buying an eco-friendly product.”

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Victor brings up the example of Method brand soaps, which he considers to have a similar business model to Sepura. Being enamored with beautiful designs he likes that Method’s primary goal is selling soap that looks beautiful on the shelf. The fact that you turn the product around and see a list of great ingredients is an extra asset. Victor wants to break down the notion that sustainability is inherently expensive. “A hurdle I see in this space is that you never see the eco-friendly product being cheaper or the same price as the traditional alternative. For most consumers, it comes down to price. That’s a big wall that we have to push past. Even eating organic is more expensive. You’re paying more to be environmentally conscious. We need to make eco-friendly products the norm, it shouldn’t be a different segment.”

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It’s clear that Victor feels that there is still much to be done, and he is always enthusiastically looking forward to hearing feedback from his customers to make Sepura even better. His feedback for new entrepreneurs? Focus on selling the product. “Are people buying it? If not, improve or pivot then ask yourself again, now are they buying it?” For Victor, sustainability isn’t a trend — it’s a solution.

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