The first seeds of Tidy Planet were sown in the early 1990’s when keen gardener and inventor John Webb wanted to speed up the composting process on his smallholding. He developed a machine that could treat his garden waste and horse manure and turn it into highly nutritious compost in just 14 days.

Working closely with DEFRA after the 2001 foot and mouth crisis, John and his son, Simon, continued develop the machine to ensure it was fully compliant with the Animal By-Products Regulations to safely treat other organic wastes, including food waste. It wasn’t long before The Rocket was born – and so essentially was our company – Tidy Planet! Initially known as Webb’s Rocket, the machine took flight and was a huge hit with a variety of community composting projects. It didn’t stop there. Simon quickly saw that The Rocket could be the key to solving the problem of the rising costs of food waste disposal for many organisations. The Rocket provided them with a clean, easy to use product that reduced not only their waste costs but their landscaping costs too. Now The Rocket has gone global flying off to Africa, USA, Kuwait, Canada, Georgia, Hong Kong, Greece, Italy and other far-flung destinations and is providing a site proven treatment system for food wastes.

Composting sadly wasn’t and still isn’t for everyone, so whilst the Rocket was becoming more and more popular, our clients were asking us what else could we do for them? So to help address this, we started to diversify and in 2007 we introduced the Dehydra food waste dewatering system to help clients reduce the volume of food waste they had. In 2009 and we brought in the first line of food waste drying systems, a different method of food waste minimisation and great for packaged wastes and by 2013 we’d built our first energy from waste plant.

Since 2012, we’ve continued to supply our clients with Rocket composting systems, but the Rockets have increased in scale by a huge degree and our largest full scale plant will now treat up to 10,000tonnes per year. We continue to build off the shelf and bespoke food waste dewatering systems and we continue to retail and install food waste drying systems. Our energy plants for food wastes can be seen in the UK treating 7-15,000kg per day of packaged and contaminated food wastes and we even have 7 large food waste to energy plants working in Georgia and Azerbaijan.

Since 2016 we have broadened our scope somewhat and are now dealing with other troublesome organic wastes such as wood wastes, sewage screenings and poultry inedibles on a much larger scale using waste compliant biomass plants. We are looking to become an owner operator of our first waste to energy plant for  in 2019 where we will be using the wastes to generate electricity and we will still be continuing to supply our food waste composting, dewatering and drying systems through our distributor network from Solihull to Switzerland to South Africa and beyond!