Can food recyclers help us tackle household food waste?

The process, no matter how it went, was sometimes stinky, and especially in warmer months, included small fruit fly infestations (I figured out pretty easily how to keep these in check with a formula of vinegar, sugar and dish soap). Even still, I have enjoyed being a countertop composter for the most part, and since the average person wastes 238 pounds of food per year — about 21 percent of the food they buy — it has brought me a sense of purpose and pride to see how much food I keep out of the landfill.

In the past couple of years, I’ve been served social media ads for what I assumed were kitchen countertop food composters; after further reading, I realized they were actually “food scrap dehydrators” or “recyclers.” Companies like Lomi and Mill are offering up handsome bins that promise to make composting easier, by drying up all of your leftover food and eliminating that wet, stinky stage before you add the waste to a compost bin or trash can. Are these machines actually worth it?

Why it matters

For a long time now, I’ve cared passionately about reducing waste of all kinds, but especially food. I have organized many of my shopping and cooking habits to reduce waste at the outset, but even on my best days as a food-waste warrior, I am creating a lot of organic scraps: eggshells, banana and orange peels, coffee grounds and chicken bones. Then there are the crusty cat food bits from the bottom of my pets’ plates; the leftovers I ate nearly all of; the greens I bought and didn’t finish before we went out of town. Even food-waste MVPs don’t bat a thousand.

Since I’ve long had a system and it works, I never had the itch to get one of these machines until Mill offered me a loaner. Up until recently I was doing something environmentally responsible out of virtue and desire — but not because it was required of me. As of April 1, 2025, however, it is actually the law here in my city: My organic scraps are not allowed in the regular trash or I could be subject to a fine. Mill has started targeting social media ads to New Yorkers and features the NYC-centric marketing on its homepage. Could the machine be especially useful to an urban dweller subject to new mandatory composting laws?

The Mill machine has the footprint and overall look and feel of a tall, large kitchen garbage can. This shape and height means you can scrape your end-of-meal plates into it just as you might the trash. No new muscle memory needed. Other companies make smaller machines that live on your countertop and cost less money. The Mill absorbs odors with a charcoal filter, which takes up much of the space in the machine and requires an extremely simple installation and periodic replacement. The unit plugs into a wall outlet and runs (pretty quietly) on electricity.

There’s an associated app that connects to your machine via WiFi. When you set it up, the app instructs you to choose a name for your machine; fresh off season three of “White Lotus,” I named mine Walton Goggins. Each day I check in on Walton — something I can no longer do with the real Walton Goggins — and the app tells me how he’s doing (e.g.: “Walton Goggins is cooling down”).

The app also lets you set what time of day to start the grinding and dehydrating process, which depending on how much and what kind of scraps you put in, can take anywhere from three to 10 hours, in my experience.

The app (and occasional emails) will also tell you how many pounds of food you have diverted from the landfill. Less than two weeks after I received the machine, on Earth Day actually, I got an email alert that I had diverted 20 pounds. By week six, I was up to 80. Now, as a dutiful home composter, I would have diverted all of these scraps regardless, but for a person who wouldn’t have done it otherwise, that is a great outcome.

So what do you do with the brown, odorless, dirt-like end product? You can dump it in your curbside municipal compost bin — taking up much less space and creating less mess and smell and attracting fewer vermin than wet food scraps do. Or you can bring it to your farmers’ market or community compost site, where it will have the same benefits. According to the Mill company, you can also use the end product to feed your chickens, something I won’t have a chance to test out, or send it back to the company, in boxes they provide, for them to turn into commercial chicken feed. Another of these machines, Lomi, produces a product the company suggests you use as “plant food” on houseplants or in your garden.

City vs. country

I was curious what the value proposition might be for someone who lives outside a city, or who doesn’t have a municipal compost pickup. FoodPrint’s digital marketing and communications manager, Kristen Link, agreed to be a guinea pig and borrow a Mill to use at her house, which is rurally situated. She has a backyard garden with a tumbling composter (and the option of drop-off at a municipal site a car ride away).

“I was curious because, as a family of four, we now generate a lot of food scraps,” says Kristen. “I’ve been composting for years and recently it’s felt like my food scraps are just getting a little out of control. I have more people to feed.”

Did this other avid composter see the utility in a machine like this? “I was hoping it can solve the issues that we have, which are bug control and the smell and all of that, and remembering to bring [the scraps] out to the composter,” says Kristen. “But I questioned whether we really need this thing that adds another step in the process: Will this step actually make a difference in our day-to-day?”

When she borrowed the machine, it was still cold enough outside that her backyard compost was frozen. Having the Mill bin indoors meant that, while waiting for the spring temps to defrost her compost tumbler, she could collect scraps for a couple of weeks without using up valuable freezer space: a win.

Is it worth it?

I asked Kristen what she thought about food scrap dehydrators before getting the machine and what she thinks about them now. Would she ever buy one? “I think at the beginning,” Kristen comments, “I would have said ‘absolutely not.’ I’ve never spent $1,000 on a machine that does something that I could basically do for the cost of the $30 bucket that I use to bring scraps into my garden.” She adds: “But I will say for the lack of bugs and smell, especially living where we do (because we have a lot of fruit trees in our backyard), I would be willing to pay, I don’t know, maybe like $500 for a machine.” Yep, the machine costs $999 to buy, or $35/month to rent. A Lomi machine costs closer to $300, but it has a smaller capacity.

Both of us found there’s no odor, except a sort of earthy, not-unpleasant waft that escapes when you open the top lid. And it’s not peak bug season yet, but both Kristen and I deal with spring ants; so far the ants seem unaware there’s a bin of food here. Neither of us has seen a single fruit fly in or near the bin.

We both felt that for people like us, who are already composters/scrap collectors, the ROI is harder to measure. But for people like Kristen’s husband, who finds composting onerous, or someone even less connected to the habit of saving food scraps, there’s utility. “I do think about the fact that we use it everyday and it does bring, I think, an ease,” adds Kristen.

The takeaway

Something I thought about a lot during these six weeks is that compost is a beautiful circular system. If you take food and leave it mostly alone, besides monitoring a few aspects like composition and temperature, it turns back into soil to grow more plants. The energy efficiency and elegance of nature’s closed-loop system is definitely not present when you have a big plastic and metal machine plugged into a socket in the wall and grinding away, albeit quietly, for nine hours at a time.

As a side note: Here in NYC that calculus is already disrupted somewhat, since a majority of curbside “compost” collected is actually burned for biogas instead of turned back into soil. The Mill’s end product would be less messy and lighter for me to walk to my local farmers’ market community compost drop-off, where it would be turned into true compost instead. Something for me to consider.

Does the contraption make composting my scraps easier? Absolutely. Is it worth nearly $1,000, or a rental fee of $35/month? When the machine only has a three-year warranty? This is a question each person must answer for themselves. For me, the answer is no — based on the fact that I will still keep saving scraps without it. But for a well-intentioned newbie who hasn’t quite figured out how to begin and has the money to spare, it could be a worthwhile investment.