Stinkless Swedish Composting
by Dominic Muren, Philadelphia, USA on 04.21.05
The biggest pains of composting go hand in hand: The need to flip the pile, and the stink of it all. You've got to turn over the pile to make sure the new scraps get into the mix, but at the same time, the more you flip, the more you stir up the stinky bits to the surface, and make your kitchen or backyard a very smelly place. Lucky for you, the folks at Stiga have developed a new composting solution that solves both problems with one ingenious idea...
The Stiga Kitchen composting system allows you to inject your fresh kitchen scraps into the bottom of the pile using a lever ram system. This has two major advantages. First, your food goes straight to the core of the pile, where the warmth, and highest bacterial activity is. This speeds composting along, and ensures a quick batch of "black gold". Secondly, because the rotting food is sealed under a pile of already composted soil, unpleasant smells are locked out of your garage or garden. By the time the rotting food is pushed to the top of the pile by other injected food, it is nicely decomposed and odor free.
On top of all that, Stiga is completely sealed, so your problems with racoons and rats are over. It even comes with attractive wood siding, and can be installed permanently in your garage or garden and treated just like a trashcan.
:: Stiga Kitchen Composter [by DM]
Fabulous design, but an order-of-magnitude too expensive. $800 to recycle kitchen scraps? Calculate the payback period based on cost of buying 20lb bags of compost in the US. Assume the average user would generate the equivalent of 10 bags per year. I can buy these bags of compost at Home Depot for about $6/each = $60/year, which means I can buy them for 13 years before I would reach breakeven point on this device...and we don't even know if it would last 13 years!
Solution: -- They should sell the mechanical action alone with a blueprint showing how to build the box at home with recycled wood; or, better still, using non-decomposable and non-treated recycled plastic decking type timber. Cost should be under $150 with shipping included. Add another $150 for wood/plastic timber and you have a machine that pays for itself before 5 years is up.
Um, you do realize that the point of composting is not payback? It's about reducing your personal load on waste facilities
Well, John has a good point, and I'm sure he realizes the point of composting. He's just saying that $800 is too expensive for what it is, and I agree. That's $800 that could be put to better uses (say for a solar or rain collection system). I have a pretty standard 3ft wide plastic barrel bin that really doesn't really stink. I don't really turn my compost much either. I dig a hole in the middle each week and dump my week's worth of kitchen scraps in. I cover it up, and then dump some leaves or other yard scaps on top. There are sliding doors near the bottom for when I need to harvest some, and the way I do my composting means there's always some havestable stuff at the bottom. Don't get me wrong, it's nice. It's just overkill if you ask me.
I agree with all these points, but I would like to bring up my own. Which is that all new technologys and advancments are expencive at first and become less and less so as time goes on. This is the first prototype in what I could see beeing a possible future for home composting. Some people are willing to pay $800 to compost. Not myself, but I'm sure there is someone.
All I mean to say is, just think about flat screen TV's or solar technology. These things were much more expencive when originaly available.
If it is completely sealed, how does the pile get air for the aerobic process?
Rats propagated in my open compost heap, then chewed through the wooden walled composter I replaced it with, and later moved into my garge when I stopped its use (removing winter food source). Thick, recycled plastic timber might hopefully prevent rat entry. Spend that much and it better.