It’s no secret that food waste is a critical issue in the modern world, especially during the holiday season. In fact, the average American wastes about 1,000 pounds of food per year. I’ve always been curious about composting, but here’s the thing: I live in a small, hot apartment. Food smells are already hard to deal with. So I’ve been shopping around for a tool that makes it … dare I say … kinda fun.
Enter Mill, a company seeking to ameliorate our food-waste crisis and find a disposal solution for uneaten goods. The brand’s flagship product, the Food Recycler, is a chic, apartment-friendly, odor-free device. It’s both easy to use and an effective way of eliminating food scraps.
While composting at home is possible, it presents a number of challenges—particularly for those in smaller apartments. Mill eliminates the need for those stinky, sticky overflowing buckets of coffee and eggshells you’d lug to the compost bin each week (or, more likely, just trash). Instead, it uses automated technology and a powerful compression system to shrink your food scraps by 80 percent, leaving you with an odorless, nutrient-rich, dry ground mixture.
Here’s how it works: You throw just about anything into the Mill—fruit skins, chicken bones, coffee grounds, any compostables—and the machine runs automatically each night, whirring away as quietly as an air purifier. The Mill can hold up to 40 pounds of food, and once your bin is full (which takes several weeks), the dry remains are ready to be turned into chicken feed or compost for your garden. If you don’t live in a place with a garden—or chickens for that matter—Mill will help arrange local pickups or send you boxes, which can be delivered directly to farms in your area via USPS.
Since smell is always my biggest concern when it comes to compost, I love that Mill uses activated-charcoal filters, which absorb all of the odors of the food scraps. To my relief, it attracts no pesky pests or fruit flies.
For the compost-curious, Mill offers a 90-day money-back guarantee. In a world of useless new products, Mill makes me believe there are still gadgets worth buying.
