Welcome to the webpage of the University of California Santa Cruz Compost Engineering Challenge!

Our mission is to encourage urban composting, whether it be at home, in a community garden, or in an urban space, by breaking down financial and knowledge barriers to effective compost systems.

Out goal is to test composting systems and to design a cheap, rat-proof, and DIY compost system for home composting. The challenge has run for two years. Many of the systems we built in 2024 and 2025 were compromised by rats! Building a system that is easy to use, cheap, but also rat proof is quite challenging. Our search for the perfect compost design continues! To stay in touch with updates, you can follow our YouTube playlist here.

We are currently working on a promising design that is being tested with infra red camera. We'll be posting the design video here soon. Stay posted!