Get the Grime on the Most In style Kitchen Composters and Meals Recyclers

The countertop kitchen composter is a stunning imaginative and prescient. As a substitute of a smelly bucket of vegetable scraps and low grounds breeding fruit flies in your counter or attracting rats to your yard, you might simply put all of it right into a nifty electrical gadget, and at some undetermined level sooner or later you may have a bountiful provide of nutrient-rich compost to make use of in your backyard.

Sadly, not one of the extra in style electrical machines in the marketplace do that. Regardless that a few of these gadgets are marketed as “composters” and have instruction booklets and apps detailing all the ways in which one can use compost, the vast majority of kitchen composters are just going to grind up and dry your food scraps. Your waste output will be greatly reduced in volume and will no longer smell, but if you’re hoping to put eggshells and banana peels into a machine and magically scoop out the kind of true compost you’d buy at the garden center, that’s just not going to happen.

That said, you can mix small amounts of these grounds into potting soil in very small ratios, or use them as feeder for a “real” compost pile, however most of those machines are meant for these wanting to scale back the amount of meals waste their family produces. Which is in and of itself a reliable aim, as cast-off meals makes up 24 p.c of municipal stable waste, ensuing within the launch of methane, a harmful greenhouse gasoline, because it breaks down within the landfill.

Or maybe you’d just like your food grounds to be odor-free and shelf-stable before adding them to your green waste bin for municipal composting or your backyard compost. In any case, despite critics’ cries of greenwashing and corporate astroturfing, there is still value to these devices. They make people more aware of their food waste. They don’t use as much power as you think they would (around 1 kilowatt-hour was typical). And our top pick, the Reencle Prime (read our full review here), even produces something close to compost.

Read on for our assessment, and once you’re done, check out some of our other kitchen-related guides, including Best Coffee Makers, Best Toaster Ovens, Best Meat Subscription Boxes, and Best Meal Kit Delivery Services.

Up to date October 2025: We have added Lomi’s latest mannequin and eliminated a discontinued composter, rearranged the structure of this text, and ensured up-to-date hyperlinks and costs.

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{Photograph}: Kat Merck

Reencle

Prime Electrical Composter

As beforehand talked about, none of those machines make really ready-to-use compost, however the (learn our full evaluation right here) comes closest to a standard compost bin. In style in South Korea years earlier than it appeared within the US, the Reencle arrives with a starter bag of ReencleMicrobe (which might be bought individually for $65) containing activated carbon, wooden pellets, glucose, and a trio of patented microbes able to chow down. There’s additionally a prefilled carbon filter that slots into the again.

{Photograph}: Kat Merck

At 14 x 15 x 22 inches, the Prime is too large for a kitchen counter but instead conveniently operates much like a heated trash can. The lid can be opened via sensor at the bottom or a button on the control panel, and in goes your organic matter. That’s it. There are no cycles, tablets, or auxiliary buckets to worry about. Even the app is totally optional. Within hours to days, depending on the item, the scraps are broken down into a material resembling a cross between dirt and sawdust.

The odor is not at all times nice, however it may well often be mitigated by the management panel’s Dry and Purify buttons or by including what in composting lexicon is named “browns”—dry, carbon-rich supplies like bread or shredded paper.

{Photograph}: Kat Merck

The Reencle also tends not to smell when it’s being fed its preferred diet of 1.5 pounds of scraps per day. Unlike other machines, it can also accept meat and dairy. For larger households, there’s the Reencle Gravity ($649), which is a couple of inches taller and can accept 3.3 pounds of waste a day. I also tested this and found it to be significantly quieter than the Prime—not that the Prime is noticeably loud, only about 30 or so decibels, but the Gravity is nearly silent, which is a nice bonus.

When the amount reaches the fill line, the Reencle grounds might be scooped out and added at a 1:4 ratio with potting soil, then left to remedy for 3 weeks (I used a big tub in my storage), after which it may be used for each out of doors and indoor vegetation. I’ve used this resultant combine to constructive impact each indoors and open air.