Commercial Composters Put to the Test -- Part 1

by Amy Jo Ehman

Composting is nature's way of recycling, but sometimes in the rush of modern life, we may want to give nature a boost. There are a number of commercial composters on the market offering to compost household waste faster, easier, indoors and in less space than the traditional outdoor compost pile.

We asked two Master Composters in Saskatoon to try a couple of these commercial composters and report back on their experience. Was it green thumbs up? Or two thumbs down? This is the first of their product evaluations (the second - the Worm Factory - will be featured in the February 2010 issue of WasteWatch).

NatureMill
Karen Comer is an avid vermicomposter, but was eager to try a much faster indoor composting system called the NatureMill. The NatureMill is an electric composter that resembles a bread machine, which uses heat and rotation to transform kitchen waste into finished compost in just five days. "That was impressive," says Karen. "The heat really speeds up the process."

However, her praise stops there. While the NatureMill was fast, it fell short in other ways. In Karen's experience, it was noisy, smelly, attracted flies, jammed frequently and following the instructions that it came with was onerous and inconvenient. "First of all, I don't get the concept of plugging something in to get compost," she says. "We have back yard composting and we have worms, and to me that's a lot more sustainable."

At first, she kept the machine in the house but found it was so noisy that she moved it to the garage. In the heat of summer, a swarm of flies hovered over top. The rotating "mill" jammed frequently and had to be manually loosened and restarted. The odour was unpleasant despite following instructions to add baking soda. "The baking soda didn't seem to make a difference," she reports. "The bugs were attracted by the smell so it was a disgusting machine to have indoors. It was really gross."

For every five cups of food waste, she was instructed to add one cup of sawdust pellets and one tablespoon baking soda, but the instructions also restricted the makeup of the waste: just two pieces of acidic foods such as orange peel, lemon rind, tomato, pineapple and grapes. "It was odd to count what went into my compost bin," she says.

While the finished compost was ready to spread after just five days, she found it to be dry and lifeless, not rich and moist like the compost produced by her worms. Final word: "If you want to process as quickly as you can, and get that much compost out, then go for it. But if you're looking for something that's sustainable and environmentally friendly, it's not easy to live with."

NatureMill Composter - thumbs down.

(Source: November 2009 WasteWatch)

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