I&#;ve tried a few methods of composting in the past with little success so the idea of creating compost right in my kitchen using an electric composter was definitely appealing &#; but is it too good to be true? To say I had a few questions is an understatement! For starters:
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After some initial research and experimentation, I think electric composters can be a valuable addition to a home, especially if you live in colder climates where composting can get tricky. You should be aware though that the product created by most of these appliances isn&#;t finished compost. You&#;ll need a plan for managing this new form of food waste to really take advantage of their value. I think there&#;s hope for them being a good tool for diverting food waste from our landfills and the goal of this series is to give us some answers to help make them work for us and the planet.
First, let&#;s look at some things we&#;ll need to know before purchasing an Electric Composter such as the FoodCycler, the Lomi, or any of the host of brands now available.
Compost is a mixture of decayed or decaying organic matter used to fertilize soil. Compost is usually made by gathering plant material, such as leaves, grass clippings, and vegetable peels, into a pile or bin and letting it decompose as a result of the action of aerobic bacteria, fungi, and other organisms.
While my parents and several of my siblings have had successful composting experiences, I&#;ve not been so lucky. I&#;ve tried:
None of the above have been very successful &#; to the point where Brian&#;s reluctant to try any kind of composting again. Granted, I probably made mistakes with each of these methods but if a consistent, delicate balance over time is required I&#;m probably not the person to make it work!
Still, I want to reduce the amount of waste we send to the landfill and find a way to use the nutrients we&#;re throwing away. There must be something I can do! Naturally the idea of a device that can create compost immediately and without the mess or smell appeals to me. Unfortunately, these appliances can be costly so I decided to do some more research before deciding to purchase one.
While the size, shape and mechanics may differ between brands, most electric composters process food scraps in similar stages:
Cycle times can vary, not only by brand but by the type of scraps you&#;re processing. Most manufacturers post a 1-8 hour typical cycle time and energy usage of about 1 &#; 1.5KW per cycle. That&#;s about the equivalent of a small space heater running for an hour.
Even before examining the usefulness of the product created in this way, I can think of some easy advantages and disadvantages of using an electric composter:
ADVANTAGESDISADVANTAGESReduced time to process food waste &#; Waste is reduced in volume within hoursInitial cost &#; There&#;s a definite barrier to entry for many households.Reduced effort to deal with food waste &#; The machine does all the work as long as you input reasonably sized food scrapsInitial environmental impact &#; It has to be manufactured and shipped creating an environmental impact. No smell or mess -The units are completely enclosed and have complex carbon filters to remove smell from any output.Limited scale &#; The amount of food scraps you can process at any one time is limited by the size of the bucket. If you are vegan, be prepared for a unit to be running constantly!No bugs or other pests &#; Don&#;t get me wrong, I love bugs and animals but a compost heap can get overrun with them if not managed properly. Ongoing costs &#; The cost of electricity to run it while small can still be counted. Plus many units have filters that require regular replacement. Less waste going to the landfill &#; As long as you can use the product on site.Product should not go to landfill &#; Preliminary studies have shown that while the volume of waste is drastically reduced, it would take longer and produce as much methane gas as untreated waste in the landfill. Easy storage of the product for future use &#; This is especially meaningful for cold climate dwellers like us.They don&#;t actually make compost &#; read on!The biggest downside to an electronic composter that I can see so far is that few of them appear to actually make compost. Going back to the definition of compost above, it doesn&#;t seem like there is any aspect of aerobic bacteria, fungi, or other organisms at play in the process. As far as I can see, all we&#;re making is dehydrated, ground up food.
Given the few, mostly convenience-based advantages and the environmental disadvantages of electric composters noted above, I still don&#;t think they&#;re completely useless. If you can find a way to use the product at home they could be a pretty big win for our gardens and the environment. While not confirmed (yet), I can see some possibilities that could make these appliances valuable additions to your home:
The idea of electric composting appears to hold enough promise to keep me engaged!
As we were moving into our new home, I saw a post from our Municipality that they were going to be running a pilot project in cooperation with FoodCycler by Vitamix. According to the publication I received &#;The purpose of the FoodCyclerTM Pilot Program is to measure the viability of on-site food waste processing technology as a method of waste diversion. By reducing food waste at home, you can support your municipality in their environmental goals, reduce your household&#;s carbon footprint and extend the life of your community&#;s local landfill.&#;
The infrastructure for waste disposal in our area is limited; our dumps are quite small and our household waste is trucked away after the weekly collection. This results in higher costs to the municipality (and property owners through taxes) and higher emissions as the trucks run. It makes sense that we should want to do all possible to reduce the overall costs of disposing of waste.
I understand there are a number of pilot programs going on across Canada. If you&#;re intrigued by the idea of electronic composters too, you can check with your municipality to see if they have similar programs in place.
What perfect timing for this Pilot Project! I quickly applied to be a participant in the pilot program and soon my application was accepted. I was able to purchase my FoodCycler and take advantage of the subsidized cost provided by the Municipality.
Soon I had my FoodCycler in hand and familiarized myself with the proper operation and care of the unit. Then I was ready for some experimentation of my own!
My plan was to keep the FoodCycler unit in our pantry. I soon discovered that it, plus the freezer and bar fridge we already have in there, would create a warmer environment that I&#;d like for a pantry. So, after pulling it out of the pantry and into the kitchen to run, and about 6 cycles to make sure I was using the electric composter properly, I moved it to the garage. I know it&#;s not a pretty set-up, but we plan to build a bench/storage unit and it will have a permanent home there.
My FoodCycler in the garage.It certainly does reduce our waste overall! You should know something about me, to help quantify the amount of kitchen waste we produce: I&#;ll often throw out a significant amount of plant based food as I go off our meal plan or get lazy with food prep regularly. OH! Also, I am not adding any animal product other than egg shells to my FoodCycler. We&#;ve gone from often using 1 to 1.5 90L garbage bags weekly to using 1 not quite full bag. That&#;s an immediate win!
Food Waste Before Processing &#; it&#;s hard to tell but it&#;s full right up to the maximum fill line.Food Waste After Processing &#; you can see the bottom of the bucket!You can clearly see the reduced volume of food waste in the pictures above. To put that into even more perspective, the picture below shows the sum of our plant based food waste for three months. Doing some quick garbage bag math, that saved about 4 more 90L bags from going to the landfill. Less waste and less plastic from those bags too!
This is all of our plant-based food waste for 3 months!In my research so far, it appears that this reduction in waste going to the landfill is a huge win as long as you don&#;t send the product to the landfill. While none of the articles gave solid evidence or measurements of what happens to this waste in a landfill (anaerobic decomposition) setting, their argument against it intuitively has merit: while the form of the waste has changed, it still requires the same decomposition process which will create methane emissions. I found the best explanation on the Lomi site:
&#;Food waste and other organic materials produce methane and carbon dioxide during the decomposition process. The aerobic composting process does not produce as much methane as anaerobic composting because aerobic composting requires ventilation. Methane-producing microbes are not active when exposed to oxygen so they are less common in aerobic composting. Most household composting is considered to be aerobic. So if you are composting indoors or are backyard composting, you aren&#;t producing much methane.&#;
Lomi
That&#;s why we want to keep our food waste out of the landfill. But we still need to do something with it.
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Generally &#; Nope! It does however make a product that should compost faster as the particles are much smaller than what you would normally put into a traditional composter. That&#;s a theory right now, stay tuned for the experiments!
They really need to come up with a better name for these appliances as I&#;m not sure any would make real compost.
Now that we know the product of the process is simply a dry, shredded or ground version of your food scraps, and not garden ready nutrients, it seems like we&#;ve not made any really real progress beyond reducing the volume of the waste. However, I can see that there is a potential for using the product of the electric composter in an easier way than the traditional compost methods I&#;ve tried in the past.
In many online resources I&#;ve checked, it is not recommended to add the product directly to active/established garden beds. Two things could result:
I even found one experiment that produced a smelly, moldy mess when it was added to the garden. Yuck!
So, what do you do with this stuff?! Off the top of my head, here&#;s what I think you could do with the product of an electric composter:
Until we have a compost area set up here at the new place, I&#;ll be experimenting with using some of our product to experiment using smaller scale composting methods. I&#;ll store the remainder in a cool dry place while we get set up here. That&#;s one benefit for sure &#; easy, odourless storage! Follow me to see my next posts as I experiment and explore these options, and any other composting ideas I discover along the way.
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The Cottage Wife
In addition to hiking, biking, reading and writing, I like to focus on making as light an impact on the land possible, while still living a modern life.
In the course of a week, my kitchen produces a shocking quantity of what we might think of as edible trash: apple peels, garlic nubs, a bit of gristle from a steak, Dorito dust, tea bags, the iron-hard heel of a loaf of bread that&#;s been sitting out overnight. The meat scraps I feed to my dog. The bones and vegetable scraps I store in the freezer in gallon-size ziplock bags and periodically bung into a pot and simmer into stock. But even then, once the stock is made, and the chicken bones or onion ends are leached of all their flavor, I&#;m left again with edible trash&#;only now it&#;s soggy. And then there are the times when the strawberries aren&#;t sealed right and become fuzzy with mold, or the delivery sandwich turns out to be gross, or the refrigerator&#;s compressor breaks and somehow we don&#;t notice, or I&#;m just exhausted and overwhelmed and want everything gone.
I hate putting food into the trash, because food that goes into the trash is bound for a landfill, and landfills&#;dense, lightless, airless mountains of waste&#;are the worst possible place that food can go. In that nightmarish, anaerobic environment, organic matter produces the greenhouse gas methane with terrifying efficiency. Globally, landfills are the third-greatest human source of methane emissions, just behind the fossil-fuel industry and factory livestock farming. How much food we waste, and what we do with it, is both an urgent issue and&#;like so many facets of the climate crisis&#;one that feels entirely remote in the day-to-day. A large portion of organic matter in landfills (forty per cent by one E.P.A. estimate) comes from households, so on this front, at least, our individual choices do matter&#;even when it feels overwhelmingly as if they don&#;t. Obviously, we should buy less, and we should eat more of what we buy; the weekly package of baby spinach that turns to goo in the crisper drawer benefits neither self nor planet. Cookbooks dedicated to minimizing food waste are a good place to find tidy strategies for salvage and reuse: puree the spinach glop into a green soup, for example, or take root-vegetable peelings, toss them in a bit of oil and salt, and roast at four hundred for twenty minutes to make superbly crispy little snacks. (&#;The Everlasting Meal Cookbook,&#; by Tamar Adler, is chock-full of smart ideas like these.) Pulverizing eggshells into powder for a homemade calcium supplement? Brilliant, babe. Go with God.
But, lately, I&#;ve been thinking about what food-waste people call diversion, which encompasses all the places we can send scraps besides the large intestine and the landfill. It&#;s a mistake to think that anything not eaten is necessarily wasted, that consumption is the only valid form of use. Take composting, for example: you really don&#;t need to torture yourself by making and eating and claiming to enjoy a bitter carrot-top pesto if the carrot tops can simply be flung into a thoughtfully maintained organic-matter pile and, with time, be converted into fuel for further carrots, whose bitter tops you yet again will not feel obligated to eat. Admittedly, it&#;s work: there&#;s a lot more to converting unwanted vegetable matter into nutrient-rich fertilizer than just making a big heap and walking away. (This is, more or less, exactly how to make a landfill.) It makes sense that compost is the provenance of the gardener: in a way, it is its own category of cultivation, requiring care and consideration, a proper balance of dry and wet matter, regular aeration, attentive temperature control, and season-spanning patience.
For those who lack the space, the time, or the diligence to do such things, solutions must be found elsewhere&#;for instance, in a slew of new (and newish) consumer appliances that promise to help reduce food waste and its impact. One such appliance is the FoodCycler ($399.95), which is distributed in the U.S. by Vitamix, the same folks who make extremely expensive and effective blenders. It is hulkingly large, like a night-black bread machine. The Lomi ($449, or $359 plus a twenty-dollar-per-month accessory subscription), manufactured by a company that also produces bioplastics, is satin white and curvy, with the countertop footprint of an upright stand mixer. Both the FoodCycler and the Lomi are very heavy. (The two machines were recently provided to me as samples, without cost.) The function of each is mostly the same: a user fills a provided bucket with food scraps, inserts it into the machine, sets a lid in place, and presses a Power button. Then the machine spends several hours using heat and abrasion to grind down and dehydrate the food scraps. The end result will vary in color and texture based on the raw materials you started with, but it always comes out looking pretty much like dirt.
The first day that I had the Lomi, I happened to come into possession of a somewhat ridiculous quantity of leeks. In the interest of science, I cut off their fibrous, dark-green tops (which I&#;d normally save for stock) and stuffed the machine&#;s bin up to the fill line. The Lomi has three modes, one of them meant for conserving microbes for eventual composting (it runs for a long time, at low heat), and another for breaking down bioplastics (it runs for a medium-long time, at high heat). I processed the leeks on the third mode, &#;eco-express,&#; to which the machine is preset; it runs fast and hot. Five hours later, what had started out as a football-size clump of dense vegetable matter had turned into about a half cup of dark-brown, crumbly dust that smelled faintly&#;though unmistakably&#;of burned onions. It was thrilling. I had made&#;well, not compost, exactly, but something that was much smaller and easier to dispose of than what it had originally been.
During the next few weeks, I continued to process food waste in the Lomi, and later on I switched to the FoodCycler. I&#;d often run the machines overnight, and then giddily peek in the next morning. Twisting off their lids felt like taking a nickel to a scratch-off ticket: Would the new crop of dehydrated muck be pale tan? Chestnut brown? Wispy? Chunky? Dirt-like? Mossy? For a period, I found myself cooking with more vegetables than usual, just to have material to feed the machine: potato eyes, wilty, green carrot tops (my nemesis), perhaps a larger chunk of the root end of a shallot than my fussy dicing habits might otherwise have allowed to remain. I put in shrivelled tortellini that had stuck to the sides of the pot and&#;goodbye, five-second rule&#;crackers that had fallen onto the floor. Leftovers were no longer just for eating or throwing out. A container of week-old pho need not elicit guilt when you find it languishing in the back of the fridge; simply feed your FoodCycler a snack of soup-logged sprouts, onions, noodles, and herbs. Sure, you could probably get the same net effect with a blender and a low-temperature oven, but it would smell worse. At one point, I left town for two weeks without emptying the Lomi, and returned to a kitchen smelling like absolutely nothing: these machines have activated-charcoal filters that trap seemingly every single molecule of odor.
Using the machines was fun; they made disposal feel like creation, not waste. But is that a good thing? Many proponents of traditional composting find products such as the Lomi and the FoodCycler galling, because, despite what a person might infer from how they&#;re marketed, they do not actually create compost. They have blades or shears, to grind, and heating elements, to dehydrate. What emerges, at the end of a process cycle, is not the nutritious black gold that results from a proper compost system but, rather, an organic fluff of nicely cooked, thoroughly dried-out stuff. (The FoodCycler&#;s manual dubs the end product &#;RFC&#;: Recycled Food Compound; the Lomi just calls it dirt.) &#;It&#;s like the exact opposite of composting,&#; one Reddit user wrote, in response to someone&#;s query about the Lomi, but that&#;s not exactly true, either. Even throwing your dehydrated food scraps straight into the trash is, if not a net good, then at least a net better: a round in one of these machines leaves would-be trash both lighter and smaller, lessening its landfill impact. Even better, the end product can be disposed of through community composting&#;it provides a useful fibre layer&#;or added to the soil in gardens or houseplants, where it still contributes trace nutrients. You can also buy add-on probiotic tablets that reintroduce all the microbes that the dehydration process has burned off, but this, to me, seems almost farcical: if you&#;re equipped for the compost process that follows the reintroduction of beneficial bacteria, why are you buying one of these machines in the first place?
Mill, a startup that promises an &#;entirely new system to prevent waste,&#; is not just a device but a service. Mechanically, Mill&#;s &#;kitchen bin&#; functions almost identically to the Lomi and the FoodCycler&#;dry it out, grind it down, catch the smells&#;but it is several times larger and is designed to sit on the floor. For thirty-three dollars per month, customers lease the machine and are provided pre-labelled boxes so that they can mail the end product back to the company. (I was loaned a sample machine for a few weeks, before the device was made available to the public. It&#;s now popular enough that there&#;s a waiting list.)
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