Compostingis a decisive natural action for gardeners . Breaking down food for thought scrap into compost put up food for your plants , improves water holding capacitance in the soil , and plunk for thesoil food entanglement . But composting can also be a goal for anyone who ’s eco - conscious and concerned about the amount of food waste that unnecessarily goes to landfill .
What if you could reduce your household food waste by 80 % as Lomi claims ? As a years - tenacious composter , I was very interested in reviewingPela Earth ’s “ fresh composter”to see if it ’s deserving the price .
How much food is wasted in the U.S. and how can composting help reduce it?
In the United States , intellectual nourishment thriftlessness is estimated at between 30–40 percentage of the food supply , [ equaling ] approximately 133 billion pound and $ 161 billion Charles Frederick Worth of food … Wasted food is the single largest category of textile commit in municipal landfills and represents nourishment that could have help feed families in indigence .
compost is one step in reducing the food for thought barren problem . disregarding of how efficient your meal provision is , whether your family is 1 or 12 , and even if you eat every morsel on your plate , there will always be inedible parts of food that can be composted ( apple cores , carrot peels , nut case shells , squawk pearl , seed from tomato plant , edible corn stubble , etc . ) .
And this apparently minimal constituent waste really mounts up : If you ’re not composting , it ’s going in your methamphetamine hydrochloride and thensent to landfills , where it generates methane , a strong greenhouse gas . And compost has many benefit when it ’s added to the soil : it reduce the need for chemical fertilizers ; improves crop yields ; aidsreforestation efforts ; improve body of water holding capacity ; helps sequester carbon paper ; and helps remediate contaminated soils .
Countertop composters are a great entry point
The problem with composting , for most the great unwashed , is how to do it on a small scale without making your house olfactory perception like a Hudson River garbage barge ? Fortunately , the new generation of kitchen countertop composters take compost uncommitted to almost anyone . No bigoutdoor compost binis needed , no compost pail under the cesspool , and your kitchen wo n’t smell like the business end of a skunk .
Lomi composter features
Devices like Lomi are becoming quite pop . They ’re categorized as kitchen composters , home composters , countertop composters , compost simple machine , smart food wastefulness composters , or electric composters . Some are industrial grade , some are the size of your kitchen wastebasket , and some search dope next to your Breville toaster . Lomi is one of the latter .
Lomi has a sleek design and will depend justly at home in the highest of high end kitchen . For the most part , the composter is designed intuitively – its operation is pretty well-heeled to figure out even if you hate reading manuals like I do . And speaking of manual of arms , you just necessitate to click the QR code on the paper manual of arms to get a consummate video tutorial on your smartphone that walks you through how to set up your Lomi and how to run it .
Lomi has 3 modes
How does the Lomi composter work?
Lomi uses a combination of heat , grind , airwave , and microorganisms supplied in the Lomi pods ( included ) for aerobic decomposition . In essence it mimics what happens in a sunlight - heated compost bin , only much faster and on a smaller scale ( the grinding in an out-of-door bin is furnish by the human who chop up the yard waste ) . Foul odors are eliminated with 2 charcoal filter : one that sit aside the compost bucket and one that sits in the rear of the composter .
How Lomi performed in our tests
Lomi composter test #1
Our first bucketful of kitchen waste in the Lomi composter is pictured below . Underneath the spinach and carrots are banana peels , 2 bowls of mouldy , skill - y experimentation - looking Jell - oxygen from the back of the fridge , and a few 24-hour interval worth of damp umber drudgery . A pretty wet , goopy mess and the kind of variety that Lomi does not recommend , but we care press boundaries . We coif it to Grow Mode , throw in 1 of the Lomi tablets , and ran it until it shut off about 16 time of day after .
The miscellany below look pretty nasty , veracious ? Even though it ’s a goopy mess , there is absolutely no foul odor , which tell us that the microorganism in the tablet did their problem very well . So did the charcoal filters . It ’s perfectly all right for the garden and we tossed it in between our lettuces .
Lomi Test #2
For our next test , we went in the opposite guidance : We only add Zea mays husk and the very toughened merchantman of the great black-backed gull from 4 ears of maize . We again threw in 1 Lomi tablet and 3 tablespoons of piss , as instructed in the video tutorial . Again , we bleed it on Grow Mode until it halt . During that time , we noticed that Lomi work considerably hard than it did in test 1 . Much more grinding , which was to be expected from the hazelnut bottoms ( in reality part of the corn stalk ) .
This sentence , we had just the opposite result . Lomi shredded and dried the corn chaff to something that resemble powder and shredded newspaper . Again , there was zero odor , and this was perfectly hunky-dory for the garden . We threw it on our sweet peppers .
Lomi Test #3
Test 3 was to see how good the Lomi composter is at break down compostable plastics in Lomi - approved musical mode . Material made in this mode is not to be bring directly to plants , but is intended for add to your green bin or compost plenty for further partitioning . This was our stopping point - cleaning - out - the - fridge and locker deal : alimentary paste , sauerkraut , a piddling kielbasa , overripe banana , banana Peel , a handful of Cap’n Crunch ( not that we wipe out that … ) , Libyan Islamic Fighting Group , and some other mysterious constitutional content that used to be edible . To it , we add cut spell of the compostable plastic traveling bag Lomi go far in ( Lomi recommends no more than 10 % plastics in any pile ) . And just for fun , some marigolds from the garden . We put it to Lomi Mode and let it make for about 8 hour until it stopped .
Lomi composter review conclusions:
If you ’re an ecowarrior you ’ll love Lomi . you’re able to reduce your food waste by up to 80 % , and compost a portion of your shaping waste and newspaper waste . The Lomi “ dirt ” can be tot up directly to your garden , your compost pile , your indoor plants or your metropolis composting program ’s bin . Having say that , some may find the price a little intimidating .
For gardener who need a lot of compost , Lomi is just too small . But it can be of great helper over winter when the compost pile is frozen . I ’ll be able to keep composting and plunge it on the heap . I look frontward to further improvements to Lomi and , hopefully , a larger electrical capacity .
