What do food recyclers actually do, and why do they matter?

(Hint: They don’t create compost)

Hi, I’m Scott Smithline, and I’m Mill’s Head of Organics Policy and Research. I’m proud to have spent the past two decades of my life working on organics recycling and environmental research and advocacy. Prior to Mill, I served as the Director of California’s Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) and before that, as the Legal Director at the non-profit environmental education and advocacy group Californians Against Waste.

There has been a lot of buzz out there (some of it true, some of it not so much!) about what food recyclers do, how they work, and why they matter. I’m here to set the record straight.

Why throwing food in the trash is bad

The environmental impact of food in a landfill (responsible for 14% of US methane emissions, according to the most recent data from ReFED & Global Methane Hub) is enormous. When we throw food in the trash and it ends up in the landfill, it degrades anaerobically (i.e. without oxygen) and releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas 80X more potent than CO2. Methane traps heat in the atmosphere, accelerating climate change and warming our planet. In the United States, most wasted food comes from our kitchens. When food is wasted, all the resources that went into growing it in the first place (labor, water, fertilizer, etc.) are wasted, too. 

The state of composting infrastructure in the United States

Composting is a terrific solution for household food scraps. But it’s also a lot of work—and requires sufficient time, space, and skills to safely tend and cultivate a compost pile at home. Some people have access to municipally provided curbside organics collection, otherwise known as pick-up service for your food scraps provided by your local government. But most don’t. Only 15 million American households have access to food scraps collection—about 12% of all U.S. households. 

Despite laudable efforts, even the most advanced municipal curbside food scrap collection programs struggle with low participation rates, primarily because people think food scraps are gross, smelly, and difficult to deal with. A frequently cited barrier to participation is the “ick” factor, given the reality that food scraps are highly putrescible, and can be unpleasant to keep around the house in between collection or walks to drop-off sites. 

The result is food is thrown in the trash or down the garbage disposal—which is just as bad as the landfill, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Wasted Food Scale. 

How do food recyclers work, and what do they do?

Food recycling devices—like Mill—have entered the home market over the past several years. Although the specific processes (times, temperatures, moisture content, modes, etc.) vary from appliance to appliance, all of these devices (including Reencle, Lomi, and FoodCycler) can be considered food scrap preprocessors. Some are designed as dehydrators, since they dry and grind the scraps added to them. Some of these appliances are marketed as “electric kitchen composters”—while these do not fully dehydrate the food, they also do not compost it. All use an outside heating source during their processing.

It’s important to note that none of these devices make compost on their own (more on this below). It’s greenwashing to say otherwise. We’ve submitted comments to the FTC Green Guides on this point, because it’s an important consumer protection issue. 

What is Mill and how does it work?

Mill is—at its core—a smart dehydrator that takes all of your household’s food scraps, and grinds and dehydrates those scraps to create a nutrient-rich material we call Food Grounds.

Mill looks and behaves like the most stylish trash can you’ve ever seen: just tap the foot pedal and scrape your plate into the bin. But the similarities to trash end there. Mill works automatically and quietly overnight (kind of like a dishwasher, but even easier—you don’t need to remember to start it, or fill it with detergent) to odorlessly remove water from food scraps, which shrinks the volume up to 80% and stops the rotting and stink process.

Behind the magic of Mill is cutting-edge technology advancements in everything from odor management to moisture control. State-of-the-art scales and sensor systems measure how much food is added overall, while modern artificial intelligence techniques enable drying-and-grinding algorithms to get smarter and more efficient over time. We’ve committed serious time, money, and dedication to building a product that will last and become more efficient and delightful the more you use it. 

Mill’s dry-and-grind process creates a nutrient-rich, clean, dry, shelf-stable resource (Food Grounds) that can be used in a variety of ways. Although Food Grounds are not compost, they make a great feedstock as part of a composting process, or as an ingredient to feed chickens. When your Mill food recycler is full (which takes a few weeks), you have a number of non-landfill options on how to use Food Grounds as a resource, which include: 

• Send them to Mill to be turned into a chicken feed ingredient at our commercial feed facility in Washington State; 

• Support your local food system by dropping off with a local community composting operation, or take advantage of one of Mill’s local loops, such as our partnership in Phoenix with local farm R.City; 

• Feed them to your backyard flock; 

• Use them in your local garden or park as part of a composting process or add nutrients to soil; or 

• Add them to your municipal food scraps collection bin, if your city provides it.

Food recyclers are behavior change tools

Mill is a behavior change tool that makes it easy for anyone to keep food out of landfill, without dealing with the traditional mess, ick, or smells of source separating food scraps.

• To date, Mill customers have chosen to put over 6 million pounds of food scraps into their Mill—instead of the trash—and that number is growing every day.

• Nearly 50% of respondents to a Mill survey said that having a Mill at home had influenced their behavior around shopping and cooking, to reduce the amount of overall food wasted in their household. 

• In our first pilot with the City of Tacoma, a city with a mature municipal food scrap collection program, people using Mill separated ten times more food scraps than the average Tacoma household. 

  • You can see more data on the topic here, presented at the ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit conference in June 2024. 

• In Phoenix, the average Mill+R.City household in Phoenix diverts over twenty times as much food from going to waste as the average American household (per EPA data).** 
  
  

Fall in love with the problem, not the solution 

We have a saying at Mill: “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.” At Mill our mission is to keep food out of landfills. We want to make it easy and practical for people to stop throwing their food in the trash. That decision doesn’t happen at the curb—it happens on cutting boards and plates in homes and businesses across the US, at every meal, every day. 

Together, we can make wasting food a thing of the past. We’re just getting started.