If you fill up a new “food recycler” with food scraps, 24 hours later you’ll have fertilizer you can use outside.

“Our goal is to try to make it much more convenient for consumers to recycle food waste,” says Kelley Rich, a senior category manager in WLabs, the internal incubator at Whirlpool Corporation that developed the new appliance, called the Zera Food Recycler.

The company, best known for dishwashers, fridges, and laundry machines, wanted to address the problem of food waste–in particular, what happens when food waste reaches landfills. In the U.S., 40% of food is wasted. In landfills, it releases methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide.

While some cities offer curbside pickup for food waste–and municipal composting– the device is designed primarily as an alternative for people who struggle with backyard composting.

“We have a hypothesis that the early adopters of this product are either people who currently compost, and are frustrated with the process, or those who have tried composting in the past but have stopped due to the inconveniences associated with traditional composting methods,” says Rich.

Traditional composting can take six months to a year to produce ready-to-use compost; it also requires regular maintenance of the compost pile, and collecting scraps to take outside can be smelly and attract bugs.

Unlike most composting devices, which use heat to dehydrate the scraps, the new appliance uses a plant-based additive to help break food down, along with oxygen, moisture, heat, and agitation. “It actually was a huge technical challenge to make sure that we designed the mixing system and the additive correctly to provide consistent quality fertilizer every time,” she says.