The Lie of Countertop “Composters”
So. Many. People. Ask me about counter top “composting”machines. In a sentence, these needless products (made in China) are amongst the most egregious greenwashing campaigns of the 21st century. They appeal to our culture of excessive and extreme convenience at the expense of literally EVERYTHING ELSE that’s hiding in plain sight if we only bother to look. They are needless pieces of trash that are actually a liability and they have no place on our planet.
What they do:
These machines are nothing more than a food grinder and dehydrator in one. If you put food in your quisinart, turn it on, and then put your quisinart inside a dehydrator, you are accomplishing the exact same thing. Sounds pretty stupid, right? That’s because it is. The only difference is that these counter top grinder dehydrators have grinding arms that move slowly (unlike a quisinart, for instance), so they can grind and grind and grind for many hours (using an insane amount of energy for the liability they create). As the food is being ground up, it is also being heated up and dehydrated.
What they claim to make:
Some companies will falsely claim that the food their machines ground up and dehydrate is a “soil amendment.” Others even more egregiously lie that their machine makes “compost.” ALL OF THIS IS FALSE ADVERTISING. IT IS A LIE. THEY MAKE NOTHING MORE THAN GROUND UP, DEHYDRATED FOOD. From this point onwards, I will refer to the worthless, liability of a “product” these machines make as GUDF.
Compost is both a noun and a verb. Compost is organic matter that has decomposed aerobically (with oxygen) into tiny, uniform pieces that resemble a light clay-like substance. This process takes months when organic matter begins and remains in optimal conditions, either in nature, or with human intervention. When organic matter is decomposing, it is composting. When it is thoroughly decomposed, it has composted and is finished compost. Although there is a range of what is considered finished compost (there is less mature and more mature finished compost) all finished compost has a group of indicators observable by our senses. These include smell (always a faint smell - earthy, soil, hardly any smell at all) a structure of particle sizes that sticks together when grabbed in a fist, and a particular and stable carbon to nitrogen ration, to name but a few. Finally, finished compost is beneficial for soil and plants.
GUDF IS NOT COMPOST. GUDF has NONE of these indicators because it hasn’t been composted. Some of these companies claim their GUDF is a soil amendment. This is a lie. The definition of a soil amendment is ___ organic (once alive, like compost) and inorganic (never alive, like rock dust) anything added to soil that is beneficial for soil and for the growth of plants. Ground up, dehydrated food is in no way beneficial for soil or for the growth of plants. Quite the opposite, it is detrimental to them.
These companies instruct their consumers to mix their GUDF at a rate of 10% with soil. Let’s explore this. Isn’t the point of these machines “convenience?” Is there a place in your backyard or front yard (if you have either) where you are able to lightly and easily till (break up the top few inches of soil and mix in their GUDF on an ongoing basis? If you do have exposed earth (not covered in grass, shrubs, mulch, etc.), it’s probably pretty compacted. No fun to till that up. Though they don’t do the math for you, if you are tilling a mere 2.5 inches, you can add no more than 1/4th of an inch (10% of 2.5 inches). Even with a family of one, you’re going to run out of space pretty quickly, but long before that, you’re going to run out of motivation to do this.
What if you have a vegetable garden with easily tilled soil? You’ll still run out of square footage real quick, but more importantly, your harm the soil and plants in your garden. There’s a reason why these companies say not to mix more than 10% of their GUDF into soil, because it will harm the growth of plants if you use any more than this. Furthermore, using even 10% or less of GUDF isn’t good for soil and plants. The strategy they are instructing is to”sweeping it under the rug.” When someone (like your teenager) is assigned to cleaning the living room, they might sneak sweeping shmutz and dust under the rug in hopes that no one notices. If they only do a little bit, and no one picks up the rug to look, they might get away with it. But id they start sneaking heaps from all over the house and patio under the rug, and if they do this numerous times, everyone will know. When people sneak GUDF into their soil at the rate of 10% or less one time, they may not notice that their plants are harmed, but if they do more than this, or they do it repeatedly in the same space in a regular rotation, their plants will suffer and die. GUDF is unequivocally NOT A SOIL AMENDMENT.
What about using it as a mulch on top of soil? Mulch is UNdecomposed organic matter, such as leaves, wood chips and straw, that cover the soil. Undecomposed organic matter helps soil retain moisture and encourage soil organisms to flourish in the top inches of soil. Some may prefer the look of wood chips over leaves or straw, but mulch also looks “acceptable.” Because GUDF is still essentially food, it can’t be used as mulch unless you don’t mind attracting rats, squirrels, possums, raccoons, skunks and a long list of other critters small and large. Not to mention it looks distasteful by any stretch of what’s aesthetically passable.
So what DO people do with GUDF? In a most ironic and offensive twist, companies instruct their users to put their GUDF in their organics containers (IF they have them) that are picked up along with trash and recycling from their city (or private) waste hauler!! WTF - this hunk of plastic and metal imported aaaaall they from China that takes an absurd amount of energy ____ to do what it does on a daily basis makes GUDF only to be tossed in the organics container (to be “composted” at an industrial green waste facility)??? Hand on forehead - wow.
Side note - big industry has coopted the term “compost” because compost is a commodity - it has value. In reality most green waste facilities are in the business of waste reduction. The product they make is somewhere between mulch and compost, it is often contaminated with anything and everything constituents put in their containers such as dog poop, motor oil and persistent pesticides. I wouldn’t want this stuff on the parkway in front of my house. And yet, I would strongly advise anyone to put their food scraps and food waste in their organics container rather than make GUDF out of it only to go to the waste hauler after wasted time and energy.
It is SO EASY to save food waste for the week and put it in the organics container for pick up. Other than the GUDF machines, this is the worst thing we can do with our food waste with the exception of the landfill. Put it in the freezer! The freezer is actually more energy efficient the more filled up it is. Use a 2 gallon bag. Dump your moldy yogurt and all the nastiest stuff you got in it and find it all frozen and sliding cleanly out of the bag and into the organic container and use that bag again and again for years. Done.
Now, if you’d like to participate in healing the planet (the planet that sustains us!), by taking full responsibility for your waste and doing the single best thing you can do with it - composting it where you live (best), or finding a friend, community member, community garden, or local composter who will compost it for you (second best), that would be… what we all need to be doing, and - mark my words - will eventually have to do to create more resilient, lower carbon footprint communities in the 21st century.
THE COMMERCIAL VERSION: the “anaerobic digester”
These machines live on the side of buildings, cost at minimum $50K, make GUDF out of dozens to hundreds of pounds of food waste per day, use unbelievable amounts of electricity to do so, have lots of parts to break and wear out, and take time and energy to operate. They do exactly what the counter top versions do on a larger scale - nothing more. Their merit - if they have any - is shrinking the weight and volume of food waste so more can fit into a dumpster to be hauled off to a facility to be further “processed.”
These companies make all the same claims as the counter top GUDF companies. They say, “we have a technology that turns food waste into a soil amendment in 24 hours,” and they instruct consumers to mix it into soil. We address these lie in the counter top section above. However, it’s one thing to mix cup fulls of GUDF into your garden beds (we’re warning you again - don’t do it!). It’s quite another to find hiding places for multiple to dozens of wheel barrows of GUDF per day. This makes their claim and instructions even more deceptive and egregious. Literally no organization who is duped into buying one of these machines uses their GUDF for anything. They pay their waste hauler to remove it, but only after they have spent an absurd amount of money to power the thing on a daily basis, as well as pay their custodians to dump food into the machine, collect it once it’s made into GUDF, snd dump it once more into the waste hauler dumpster.
