Countertop Food Recyclers

 

It’s the hot button item of the year- Countertop Food Recyclers. Interesting- but what does that mean?

I’d like to start off this topic by saying countertop food recyclers are not composters. Compost must go through thermophilic and resting stages to reduce pathogens and create a stable product. Many of these machines may use some tricky language and marketing, but real composting is a process and is going to take time. It certainly won’t happen overnight.

Then what is a food recycler? I think a more appropriate name is a food preprocessor. Here's how they work; You place your food scraps in your recycler, and the machine will “pre-process” the food scraps by grinding and dehydrating them. This can include some tough materials like avocado pits, that can take a long time to breakdown in your typical backyard compost pile. By dehydrating and grinding, the volume of your food scraps will decrease.

The product from these machines is dry and doesn’t look like food anymore, but once again, it is not compost. If you were to put this material straight on your garden beds, you might notice some decomposition odors after a rainfall from the rehydrated scraps, or maybe even some curious critters. It’s not a stable product just yet. Another common complaint is that these machines need energy to function, which will inherently have less environmental benefit than backyard compost.

There could be positive attributes to pre-processing food scraps. Once processed, food scraps will compost faster in your pile, a big part of that due to the grinding that has already occurred. With the pre-processors, you can store more scraps indoors, as the volume of the scraps has been reduced. Odor from keeping your scraps indoors may be less of a concern, as the machines advertise odor control. Some of these machines can also take a wider variety of food scraps (such as bones and animal product), than some backyard composting can accommodate. Of course, you should still check if your community allows bones or animal products in backyard composting if your intent is to compost your pre-processed scraps.

 For me, I intend to stick to my backyard pile, covering food scraps with carbon material to cover smells and letting the compost pile do its thing.

We hope you had a great holiday from our team to yours. If you are still in the Christmas spirit, or have some holiday compost questions, you can check out some of our previous holiday themed compost blogs:

Difficult to Compost Compostables: Christmas Trees

A Composter’s Christmas Carol

The Naughty and Nice List for Composting

Santa’s Top 3 Winter Composting Tips

Blogger: Sam Plante