Worm hotels have slowly gotten more established as a way for composting on a local basis, especially within dense urban environments. Especially in Amsterdam, this is important as the city does not have centralised composting infrastructure and requires nutrients in the soil. However, there are two key issues with the approach: The process takes quite long, which limits the amount of people who can use worm hotels to compost; and the worms are sensitive to climate fluctuations. This means that in winter, the composting process comes to a standstill, and in the worst case the worms can freeze and die.

The solution is a newer, better worm hotel that is trialled in Amsterdam Oost. The new worm hotel, developed by the foundation Buurtcompost, is underground, where worms naturally live and are more sheltered from the cold. They then also teamed up with the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences to create a shredder system that can be used to bring the compost into a form that is more digestable to the worms, and speeds up the process of composting. It also means that more things can be composted, as it breaks down bigger, harder, parts such as avocado pits.