The countertop kitchen composter is a beautiful imaginative and prescient. As an alternative of a smelly bucket of vegetable scraps and low grounds breeding fruit flies in your counter or attracting rats to your yard, you could possibly simply put all of it right into a nifty electrical gadget, and at some undetermined level sooner or later, you will have a bountiful provide of nutrient-rich compost to make use of in your backyard.
Sadly, not one of the extra fashionable electrical machines fairly do that. Though a few of these units are marketed as “composters” and have instruction booklets and apps detailing all of the methods by which one can use compost, the overwhelming majority of kitchen composters are simply going to grind up and dry your meals scraps. Your waste output might be drastically diminished in quantity and can not scent, however if you happen to’re hoping to place eggshells and banana peels right into a machine and magically scoop out the sort of compost you’d purchase on the backyard middle, that’s simply not going to occur.
That mentioned, you can combine small quantities of those grounds into potting soil in very small ratios, or use them as feeder for a “actual” compost pile, however most of those machines are meant for these wanting to cut back the quantity of meals waste their family produces. That is itself a authentic objective, as cast-off meals makes up 24 p.c of municipal stable waste, ensuing within the launch of methane, a damaging greenhouse fuel, because it breaks down within the landfill.
Or perhaps you’d similar to your meals grounds to be odor-free and shelf-stable earlier than including them to your inexperienced waste bin for municipal composting or your yard compost. In any case, regardless of critics’ cries of greenwashing and company astroturfing, there may be nonetheless worth to those units. They make individuals extra conscious of their meals waste. They do not use as a lot energy as you suppose they might (round 1 kilowatt-hour was typical). And my prime choose, the Reencle Prime, even produces one thing shut to compost.
Learn on for our evaluation, and when you’re carried out, try a few of our different kitchen-related guides, together with the Greatest Espresso Makers, Greatest Toaster Ovens, Greatest Meat Subscription Containers, and Greatest Meal Equipment Supply Providers.
Up to date April 2026: I’ve added the Terra II from GEME and Clear Drop’s Organics Collector to the part of different units I’ve tried and ensured up-to-date hyperlinks and costs. I am presently testing a composter from Airthereal.
Desk of Contents
Greatest General
Reencle
Prime Electrical Composter
As I discussed above, none of those machines makes really ready-to-use compost, however the Reencle Prime comes closest to a conventional compost bin. Well-liked in South Korea years earlier than it appeared within the US, the Reencle arrives with a starter bag of ReencleMicrobe (which could 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.
Reencle Gravity (left) and Prime (proper)
{Photograph}: Kat Merck
At 14 x 15 x 22 inches, the Prime is just too massive for a kitchen counter, but it surely conveniently operates very similar to a heated trash can. The lid could be opened through a sensor on the backside or a button on the management panel, and in goes your natural matter. That is it. There are not any cycles, tablets, or auxiliary buckets to fret about. Even the app is completely non-obligatory. Inside hours to days, relying on the merchandise, the scraps are damaged down into a fabric resembling a cross between filth and sawdust.
The scent is not all the time nice, however it could actually normally be mitigated by utilizing the management panel’s Dry and Purify buttons or by including what, in composting lexicon, known as “browns”—dry, carbon-rich supplies like bread or shredded paper.
{Photograph}: Kat Merck
The Reencle additionally tends to not scent when it is being fed its most popular weight loss plan of 1.5 kilos of scraps per day. Not like different machines, it could actually additionally settle for meat and dairy. For bigger households, there’s the Reencle Gravity ($649), which is a few inches taller and might settle for 3.3 kilos of waste a day. I additionally examined this and located it to be considerably quieter than the Prime—not that the Prime is noticeably loud, solely about 30 decibels—however the Gravity is sort of silent, which is a pleasant bonus.
When the quantity reaches the fill line, the Reencle grounds could be scooped out, combined with potting soil at a 1:4 ratio, and left to treatment for 3 weeks (I used a big tub in my storage). Afterward, it may be used for each outside and indoor vegetation. I’ve used this resultant combine to optimistic impact each indoors and outside.
