One of our members has an at home electric compost unit. She wanted to share her personal experience.
Elizabeth tells us how this technology has made keeping methane out of the atmosphere possible in her own apartment.
I have just put a container of kitchen waste– mouldy bread, vegetable trimmings, fruit peels, egg shells, tea leaves, etc– into the Lomi composter we bought about a month ago. It will grind and heat the bucket full of waste for about 20 hours, reducing it to a small amount of brown powder that I will use as top-dressing for my plants. The output is odorless and lightweight. As we live in an apartment we cannot have our own outdoor composter, so we welcomed this solution. Our kitchen waste now weighs almost nothing, consisting mostly of packaging, which makes it easy for us to carry out.
Because this is an aerobic process, like other well-managed composting, it does not release methane, a potent greenhouse gas. This was our reason for purchasing the composter. We are semi-vegetarians and produce a lot of vegetable and fruit waste. We also drink a lot of tea! We worried a lot about the methane our waste produced as it decayed in the anaerobic environment of the landfill. Penticton does not yet have a central composting facility, with pickup, so this was the best solution for us.
There are some tricks to operating the Lomi composter, some of which are described in the manual. I learned not to put in stringy things, like my sweet pea vines, and cooked carbohydrates like potatoes and rice, as they can turn to cement during the process. Common sense generally tells me what to include, and there is an excellent email support system to address questions.
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