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."

Comments

Thanks!

[AtariAmarok]

"The Power of Indoor Compost"

Thanks, Slashdot. Was always looking for a technical justification for not bothering to clean the house.

What about vermiculture?

[djdead]

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

Re:What about vermiculture?

[madaxe42]

This is also great fun for another reason:

Body disposal! Just drop in your least favourite neighbour/spouse/kid, and in a few days time you'll have a beautifully clean skeleton, ready for framing/grinding to make your bread!

Well... it's what they do in museums to make skeletons of samples.

Re:What about vermiculture?

[bitingduck]

We have a worm bin that we use outside (warm year round) but could just as well keep inside if we needed to. They also advertise them for use by fisherman for a steady supply of cheap worms, and we sometimes give some worms to the ducks for a tasty snack (they're wild about worms).

It's also a great way to get rid of the shredded mail that you don't want to put on the curb (things that have credit card numbers, SSN, etc)-- generally after you empty a layer you want to mix bedding with the organic waste. Bedding can be shredded coconut husks, newspaper, or mail that's shredded and moistened slightly. It disappears into the compost.

Re:What about vermiculture?

[real gumby]

The other major problem with these things is swarms of flies -- not something I really want in my basement! For example the bots (fly eggs) will also be in your food preparation trimmings, so travel into the compost without having been killed via cooking.

Another post talked about meat attracting maggots, but various fly larvae consume all sorts of rotting crud, not just meat.

Plus the smell can be pretty bad if your household is non-veg.

Re:What about vermiculture?

[real gumby]

Whoa - aren't you supposed *never* to put any kind of animal waste (meat, milk, etc) in your compost?

You are very much correct! But in reality table scraps etc end up indiscriminately in these things.

It's the same issue as with recycling: many people don't care at all (a big reason why there aren't a lot of public recycling bins in most cities -- they end up with trash mixed in), but even of those who want to recycle, following the sorting rules can be quite difficult.

Just run a big pipe

[solafide]

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. :)

Forest for the trees

[Bastian]

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.

Re:Forest for the trees

[M1FCJ]

I live an apartment. Interestingly enough the people who live in houses around my apartment have a spacial bin from the council where you can put your green waste in and they will compost it for you. For this service I can let them have the money they earn froms elling the compost (if it covers their costs). This was fine when I lived in a house. I year ago I moved out of that place and moved into this one. I share a closed enclosure for my rubbish and there is no way of binning the green waste properly. I don't produce much (a single geek can produce so much kitchen waste) and my habit of eating these days is reasonably healthy (lots of salads and stuff). I hardly have to empty my bin in a week (I don't produce a lot of unrecycleable stuff either, cans get recycled as does glass).

I can't handle the idea of worms in my kitchen either. It is a good idea to have for people like me.

Re:Forest for the trees

[Pooh22]

While I agree with you on the "think before you buy" aspect of your rethoric. In this case I think it could help:

- it reduces the amount of general waste, thus reducing the cost of moving it out of the city.
- it reduces the smell of compostable waste in a kitchen, thus making this recycling more attractive
- it makes people more aware of their effect on the environment.

Nothing is ever black or white. /Simon

Re:Forest for the trees

[Claire-plus-plus]

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.

The real reason to compost is not getting fertiliser for your garden, it's preventing waste. Food scraps take up a large volume of the space in a "landfill" and most cities in the world are having to move their "landfill" further out. Food scraps are also a source of the nutrients of life, a resource that exists in large quantities but is still finite. It is a waste of these nurtients to dump them in a "landfill" that is so full of inorganic waste and toxic substances that it is unlikely that life will ever return there without help.

Composting is like most other recycling. It prevents waste from entering landfill unnecesarily and keeps a finite resource in circulation. The nitrogen and trace minerals in the food would be more useful being used to grow more food.

I personally would like to see cities building huge composting depots where you can dump your organic waste and they can sell/give the nutrients released (compost) to farmers who can turn those resources into a useful product (food) using an abundant natural energy source (the sun).

Re:Forest for the trees

[ddewey]

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

Not true. Landfills are sealed to avoid polluting ground water. Thus a landfill is an environment mostly free of water and oxygen, so organic wastes do not decompose readily. This site has some good information on landfill decay, including this interesting fact:

"Only one-third to one-half of even easily decomposed materials such as lawn, garden and food waste is decomposed after 20 years."

Re:Forest for the trees

[Scott7477]

Actually, Oregon and Washington have existing power plants that burn methane emissions generated by decomposing garbage at landfills:

http://www.oregonlive.com/printer2.ssf?/business/o regonian/01/02/fn_11enrgy04.frame

If half of organic wastes are decomposed after twenty years, then you have that much fresh space to re-fill with municipal waste. Given that the base useful life of a landfill is 20 to 30 years, this would essentially solve the issue of landfill space for any community that doesn't have significant population growth.

Re:Are people really so lazy?

[M1FCJ]

I live in an apatment and don't have a garden, you insensitive clod!

Not attracting the woodland creatures

[Latent Heat]

When you take this ecology-woodland home-compost outside too far, you achieve a certain harmony with the woodland creatures -- the tree squirrel, the raccoon, the skunk -- and they will come to your house and invite themselves inside your house by chewing through the attic vents.

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).

Cheaper option

[bcmm]

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.

Re:Are people really so lazy?

[MobyDisk]

1) Indoor composters compost faster, and they work all year round.
2) They also work in cold climates with longer more extreme winters.
3) They work for people in apartments.
4) They are good in educational environments.
5) They can produce liquid fertilizer for indoor houseplants.
6) They won't attract animals

Cjheck out the Worm Bin Factory have worms in them. It has a little nozzle, like on a water cooler, that allows you to drain a highly potent liquid plant fertilizer, which can be used for indoor plants more conveniently than a big thing of compost.

NatureMill compost maker

[gardengranny]

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.

compost for everyone

[gardengranny]

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.

Re:Are people really so lazy?

[Scott7477]

For a compost heap to function properly it has to be quite large: "A rectangular pile 2 to 5 feet wide, 5 to 10 feet long and 2 to 4 feet high is adequate for most households. If space is not available, a single, tall pile can be used. Fresh material is added at the top and finished compost dug out at the bottom." - from the following
URL:http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=co mposting+in structions/v=2/SID=e/l=WS1/R=2/IPC=us/SHE=0/H=3/SI G=11oets7rg/EXP=1110826267/*-http%3A//www.lcida.or g/composting.html

For the size of most yards, this is a lot of space. It is hard to generate this kind of volume of the proper materials on a regular basis if you have a standard size suburban lot.

"Outside" may involve a long fall and a thud...

[leonbrooks]

...for many city dwellers.

Re:300w a lot of power?

[benjamindees]

300 Watts, 24 hours a day, is a ridiculous amount of power. That comes to about 216 KWh per month. Last time I checked, the average electric bill in the US was something like 300 KWh per month.

At 9 cents per KWh, that's almost $20 a month you're spending just to get a couple of pounds of compost.