A Composting Appliance? Sign Me Up.
Did I tell you I’ve become fascinated (kind of obsessed, actually) with composting? Talk about a great example of smart design — you take a bunch of unusable waste products, add sunlight and heat, and you get high quality, highly usable soil. Brilliant. Apparently it’s hard to beat the genius of Mother Nature.
We’ve just started composting in our own backyard. We’re using these adjustable bins and experimenting to see what works best for us. We add kitchen scraps and grass clippings to our compost bin and we’ve added bushels and bushels of wormy apples that fell from our backyard tree. I would love to get to a point where I’m able to add much of the paper waste our house creates, like homework, junk mail, and food packaging.
For much of my adult life, I didn’t have access to backyard or community composting, and I’m sure the same is true for many people. So when I saw the NatureMill Automatic Composter, a light clicked on for me.
What a neat idea! Kitchen scraps go into the top bin, then, when it’s full, the contents drop into the bottom bin, where they are rotated, heated and turned into soil. While the bottom bin does its thing, you can start filling the top bin again.
Approximately every two weeks, the bottom bin is ready to serve up a container full of nutrient rich top soil. Best part? The appliance costs only about 50 cents in energy to run for a full month. There’s even a kit to make the NatureMill an under-the-counter appliance — keeping it tucked away out of sight.
I like the idea of recycling, but I LOVE the idea of composting. Sometimes, I send my bottles off to recycling and don’t really know what’s happening to them, or how much energy is required to reuse the plastic or glass. But composting is so self-sufficient. You can see exactly what’s being reused and you know exactly what to do with the new product. No shipping or cleaning or re-selling required.
Wouldn’t it be great to see more and more cities adopting large-scale composting? I heard that some composting communities have cut their landfill by 50 percent. Impressive!
What about you? Do you compost? Would you use a kitchen compost-er like NatureMill?
We have an outdoor compost bin that we've had reasonable success with. When we made the commitment to composting a few years back, we liked the idea of the Nature Mill unit and bought what was then their top-of-the-line model. We ended up sending it back without trying it (the online reviews were very mixed), mainly because the whole thing felt quite cheap and it seemed like it wouldn't last very long. I don't know if they've made any improvements since that time — I still really like the concept of the design.