Composting biodegradable food waste is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint, but if you live in an urban area and don’t necessarily have your own backyard to start a pile in, it can be a difficult thing to pull off. It’s possible compost in small batches indoors, but keeping a rotting container of organic matter in your house is usually pretty rough on your nostrils.
Unless, of course, you pick up something like Food Cycler: Home. Basically, this contraption is a compact indoor composting machine designed to accelerate the composting process while also keeping odors at bay. At the press of a button, the device sterilizes, deodorizes, and turns potentially harmful food scraps into safe, sterilized, organic compost. The byproducts of the process have been lab tested and approved for use as a soil amendment and accelerant.
And it can handle just about anything organic, including citrus rinds, coffee grounds, pits, bones, and even preservative-laden items like fast food hamburgers. To use it, you just deposit your scraps inside the compost chamber, close the lid, and hit go. Once the cycle starts, the machine uses a combination of heat and agitation to quietly sanitize the compost and break it down into smaller particles. It doesn’t require any water or the addition of any special chemicals, doesn’t need to be drained or vented at any point, and even comes equipped with a special filter to mitigate foul smells . All you need to use it is an outlet and about one cubic foot of counter space.
Food Cycler’s inventors are currently raising funds for their first large-scale production run on IndieGoGo, but even though it’s only at the crowdfunding stage, it’s still rather expensive. If you back the project early, you can snag yourself a Food Cycler for about $399, but if you wait around until after the IndieGoGo campaign is over, it’ll retail for around $499. That’s definitely a bit steep, but could be worth it depending on your living situation
Find out more on IndieGoGo
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