Slashdot Mirror
The Power of Indoor Compost
Dominic writes "Last week, a certain Sharp kitchen composter was the talk of the internet. But sadly, it used 300W of power to run! Not quite the perfect ideal of nature-friendlyness a composter ought to be. This week, Treehugger has a better model up, The Naturemill, which is actually available in North America, and only uses 4W of power. Best of all, it can still handle enough food waste for a family of 5. So you can get your compost on without all the hastle of a pile. And without the electric bills."
Thanks, Slashdot. Was always looking for a technical justification for not bothering to clean the house.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I know of an organic indoor composter that uses 0W. It's called vermiculture. essentially you have a bin of worms in your home (basement, under the sink, heated garage...). You place the organic waste in the top and the worms crawl around and eat it and produce very rich soil.
You can build the bin yourself or buy one from a place such as this one that I picked semirandomly from google: composters.com
-1: flamebait should really be -1: inciteful
What is society coming to when people are too lazy to take their scraps outside to compost them?
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
to the compost pile just outside the house, and wash it out every once in a while. Put a grinder in, and we have the ultimate in laziness. Just throw your shredded newspaper down the pipe right before you wash it out. Problem solved. :)
These indoor composters seem to me to be a great example of people who are trying to be environmentally friendly, but get caught up in trying to do all sorts of "green" things without stopping to think why they are done, and thus doing them in some twisted way that really isn't helping anybody.
For example, I imagine that these indoor composters are meant for people who live in apartment buildings who don't have any space to compost outdoors. City-dwellers don't need, to be composting, though. People should compost to avoid consuming artificial fertilizers and incurring the environmental damange that they cause. Composting is a great way to fertilize your lawn without poisoning your soil and without being wasteful.
Call me dim, but I just fail to see where people who have no outdoor space to live in are going to find a use for several pounds a day worth of rotting organic matter. It's not like it's somehow better for the environment to throw compost in the trash than it is to pitch banana peels - they will decompose in the landfill just as nicely as they decomposed in your kitchen, and without you having to harm the environment by purchasing a large lump of plastic and burning some electricity.
You could much more inexpensively meet your keep-your-houseplants-happy compost needs by purchasing some of it every so often. I'm sure you can work out an arrangement with somebody at a farmer's market to supply you with the compost you need for far less than the $300 price tag you're looking at for this baby.
And you can do it without having to become the proud owner of yet another yuppie gadget that uselessly adds 10lb of plastic to the world and which you know is not going to make your life happy any more than your plasma TV and 5.1 surround sound system did, and which is going to end up on the curb faster than your ThighMaster did.
What exactly is the purpose of a compose pile?
Other than smelling up the neighborhood of course.
While they say you are OK if you don't have fats, meat scraps, or bones, I wonder if coffee grounds, orange and banana peels, and other compost standbys create oders that welcome these creatures. Indoor composting may be the thing to help protect your house (or a dog).
Why the fuck do you need electricity to compost stuff? I do it this way:
Take vegetable scraps, cardboard etc. (maybe not stuff like potatos, because they attract rats)
Put them in a large bin outside. Special compost bins are nice because you can get to the bottom of them where the stuff that has had time to decompose is.
Wait ages. Have more than one bin, so that after the first wait there is always compost available.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I checked out that machine and it really seems to be ideal for folks like me. It looks like it's automatic and fairly attractive. Being an older person, I don't always have the energy to mix and turn my compost pile, and it's very cold and wet outside during the winter so not ideal to be making trips to the compost pile.
Keep in mind that some people are elderly and simply can't turn half a ton of compost every month. The bigger problem for most folks is that it's cold and/or rainy in their part of the world and not pleasant to trudge out to the compost pile. I don't know about you, but it seems that I'm always emptying my compost bin late at night, or when guests arrive. This NatureMill machine http://naturemill.comnaturemill/ looks like you just press the button and it does all the mixing for you in a few mintues. That's pretty cool.
Bastian, please keep in mind that some people are elderly and don't have the ability to mix and turn a half ton pile of compost every month. It's also very cold (and wet) in some parts of the world and for six months out of the year venturing to the compost pile is not pleasant. In Canada there are many areas where bears are frequent visitors to compost piles. So the machine at http://naturemill.com/ is a godsend for some of us. And yes, you are a little dim regarding the apartment dwellers. You see, some of us have indoor plants. Some of us have neighbors. Landfilling pretty much blocks the bio-degradable process because thos landfills are sealed up and there is no oxygen. Stuff just sits there. Composting is much better for our environment - at least it shrinks the size and weight of our waste.
You're telling geeks that 300w is a lot of power? That quite a bit less than any computer I own, and those run all the time.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
For those who are critcial of using 300W to reduce the amount of garbage produced by a household by 92% (50%, say, if we consider that it only reduces food garbage) will end up saving a lot more watts in the medium to long term.
Consider how many watts are used in the 60 extra seconds it takes the garbage man to load 2 or 3 extra bags into his truck, bags that wouldn't exist if the contents had been composted. A large diesel truck probably uses about 10KW per second to run, so in 60 seconds you're using 600KW. Compare that to a week's worth of 300W composting (50,400W) and you're saving a lot of power.
Now add the number of Watts required to ship garbage via truck or barge, or to build new landfills, and you are starting to approach an appropriate apples to apples analysis of the device's energy savings/surplus.
Amazing magic tricks
It's spelt hassle not hastle. I don't know why so many people spell it incorrectly.
...for many city dwellers.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
your organic waste, and flushing it down the toilet. This would result in essentially free, recycling for the end user, since he already pays for sewage services one way or another.
Not a new idea, guy. It's called a garbage disposal, and your kitchen sink probably already has one...
That's just about the only way you'll chop up anything fine enough not to clog your throne.
Not Funny?
In .au at least, sinkwater, bathwater etc goes into the stormwater network, which then gets dumped virtually untreated back into the rivers. This is a big source of nuitrients for toxic algal blooms.
Throwing the waste into the toilet however would send it to the sewage plant, which is specifically sesigned to cope with high-nutrient matter
sustainable living
You should see some of the turds I've laid over the years. I promise you, if my toilet can handle those, a few banana and potato peels will be childs' play...
sustainable living
So it can't processes drawers of composting obsolete computer equiptment? Darn, there goes my solution for worldwide free cheap energy! :P