I Saved 2,000 Pounds of Food Waste From the Landfill With This Simple Composter (2024)

For many gardening enthusiasts, the reason to make compost is to have compost. When cultivated properly, compost offers a rich balance of moisture and nutrients that can be mixed into soil or used as mulch to promote healthy, productive growth in all kinds of plants and crops.

However, making a quality compost—one that has an ideal carbon-to-nitrogen ratio and that gets hot enough during the decomposition phase to fully break down food bits while killing off potentially harmful pathogens—takes work.

You usually have to turn your compost pile, layer ingredients in certain proportions, and occasionally even water the pile so it doesn’t get too dry. All of that is known as active or hot composting, but there is another way: passive or cold composting, which can entail nothing more than dumping random quantities of organic materials into a mound or vessel and letting the elements slowly do their thing. The compost that results from passive composting will take longer to decompose and won’t be as beneficial in a garden, but if your primary goal is to reduce what goes into your garbage, that’s okay.

“Not everybody is in a position to do active composting, and I believe in being really open-minded about that,” Linda Brewer, a senior faculty research assistant at Oregon State University’s Department of Horticulture, told me in a phone interview. “Some people don’t have a good back, some people are too busy, and some people would rather be dead than look at decomposing organic waste. All of those are fine reasons to do passive composting instead.”

The user guide that came with my Redmon bin states that you can compost “fruit and vegetable peels/rinds, tea bags, coffee grounds, and eggshells,” plus yard waste like grass clippings, leaves, and straw. (I actually throw in all parts of a fruit or vegetable, not just peels and rinds, and I also put in paper products like coffee filters, brown paper bags, toilet-paper tubes, and paper napkins.)

The guide’s list of composting don’ts includes dairy, meat, bones, and “fatty food waste,” all of which are likely to attract vermin and need a hotter composting system to fully break down. (More active at-home composters, such as the Mantis Compact ComposTumbler we recommend in our roundup of favorite compost bins, can take on stuff like crab shells, fish bones, and small quantities of dairy, but not meat.) Pet waste is also a no-no, even if it’s in a so-called compostable poop bag, because it can introduce diseases to the bin.

The same ground rules appear in the instructions (PDF) for the Algreen Soil Saver Composter, a very similar black-box bin previously recommended by supervising editor Ben Keough. “[My wife and I] didn’t do any animal bits,” Ben says, who owned the Algreen Soil Saver Composter before he moved to a new place. “Just vegetables, fruit, and bread—and my yeast and grain from home brewing.”

Brewer (who previously spoke to Wirecutter for our composting 101 guide) said that avoiding cooked, fatty foods should keep any outdoor compost bin pest free, even if it sits on the ground like mine. “You’re putting the low-interest items in there,” she explained. “If rats or other animals are interested in something like raw vegetable matter, they don’t have to come to your compost pile for that. But if you’re putting in leftover lasagna, that’s going to draw some attention.”

The Algreen Soil Saver Composter user guide estimates that a third of all household waste (including yard waste) can go into an at-home composter. That may not seem like much, but by my conservative calculation, I’ve deposited roughly 1,900 pounds of organic materials into my bin over the past six or so years. My spent coffee grounds alone, at about 5 to 6 ounces a day, account for nearly 40% of that.

Despite the fact that I don’t do anything to help my food scraps decompose, my family has had no unpleasant experiences with rodents or funky smells (although, when I pop the bin’s fitted lid to throw in my latest batch of kitchen gunk, I can see flies going to work inside it).

Even better, I’ve never turned my compost with a spade or pitchfork, nor have I ever hosed it down, added worms to it, or done any other onerous chores a serious composter might undertake. All I’ve done is dump kitchen waste into the bin and walk away, just like I do when I bring trash from my indoor garbage cans to my outdoor garbage can.

The Redmon bin’s black, plastic sides absorb and hold in heat and they’re vented for airflow, so the bin itself does all the work necessary to break down organic matter. The process is so efficient that my bin has never been more than two-thirds full. (My husband did dig a hole about a foot deep that we placed the bin on top of when we set it up to give our pile a head start.)

Little hatch doors at the bottom allow access to your compost. Despite my stubborn anti-compost stance, my Redmon compost bin has produced what looks a lot like usable compost, albeit with plenty of still-intact eggshells and plant bits mixed in.

In fact, Brewer told me that my hastily made concoction still has value. “I’d put the recognizable items back in for another cycle of composting,” she said. “The rest could be applied as a soil amendment, just a thin layer.”

Despite my worst intentions, it seems I’ve made compost after all.

This article was edited by Alex Aciman and Catherine Kast.