The Mill food recycling bin is the easiest indoor composter alternative, and my all-time favorite appliance

Finding out how to recycle any given item is a shifty inquiry that even Google’s AI Overview has trouble pinning down. And then, half the time, we’re questioning where the stuff we toss in the recycling bin actually goes. (To a legitimate recycling plant? To the ocean? Hell?) Food waste has a much clearer — and much more dire — fate. We know for sure that’s going to the landfill.

To be fair, there aren’t a ton of feasible ways to “recycle” food. Composting is an option, of course, but true outdoor composting takes months, requires yard space, and involves worms. Over the past few years, composting has made a pretty revolutionary move indoors. Electric countertop composters like the Vitamix FoodCycler and Lomi consolidated the composting process to an appliance that doesn’t hog much more counter space than a toaster oven.

Despite these advances in convenience and simplicity — two major factors necessary to make the average person consider taking the time to separating food scraps in their kitchen — this approach to countertop composting poses a recurring pickle: what to do with that material once it’s made. Mill fills the gap.

After two years with a Mill kitchen bin and many boxes of food grounds sent back, I was recently alerted about a big Mill milestone: I’ve officially diverted 500 pounds of food from landfills. Those tangible updates about the impact I’m making are such a big part of why Mill is easily my favorite appliance that I’ve tested for Mashable — and I’ve tested the Ninja Slushi, so that’s saying something. I gush about Mill to people in my real life, and I’m about to put it all in writing here.

How does Mill work?

Mill is a large electric indoor food recycling bin that sits on the floor like a trash can instead of on the counter. Like an in-home composter, it’s a less-smelly place than the trash to throw plate scrapings, forgotten fridge leftovers, old pet food, and the butt of the bread that everyone keeps bypassing. Unlike composting, Mill technically isn’t conducting decomposition or creating a nutrient-rich substance that can be added to soil. Rather, Mill dries your scraps into dehydrated grounds that look and feel similar to dirt — literally your food without the moisture content — in just a few hours.

But with those basics covered, Mill really starts to pull away from the competition. The most obvious physical difference is that Mill sits on the floor rather than the countertop and is basically like having another full-sized trash can that makes compost in your kitchen. I love that opening the lid just involves a presser foot and doesn’t require a free hand.

Instead of waiting on you to press a button when the bucket is full like its countertop competitors, Mill automatically starts dehydrating and churning at the same time every day. I chose 10 p.m. to try to ensure that everyone in my household was done eating and snacking for the night. A light on the lid appears when Mill is running.

Oh, to be a cat basking in the faint glow of the Mill bin.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

Same cat, new Mill bin.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

I actually don’t know exactly how long Mill runs overnight, but it’s always done by the time I’m up for work the next morning. It’s also so much quieter than I expected (given the Lomi’s haunted house-esque creaking), producing a low whir that you can barely hear even when standing right beside it.

Since writing my original review in 2023, I’ve received the latest generation of the Mill bin. The new version remedies every minuscule note I had about the first one, and other customers apparently had the same thoughts. It’s even quieter than before, and if you need to put something in after the bin is locked, you don’t have to press and hold a button anymore — you can literally just use the presser foot as you normally would. The exterior design and stirring paddles inside the bucket are also slightly different.

Mill takes almost any food scrap, including meat and dairy

Mill is super versatile in the variety of food you can put in it — it’s not nearly as limited as a traditional compost pile. Almost any food product can be thrown into Mill, excluding common-sense stuff like large animal bones or excessive liquids. It’s actually super easy to remember, but you can get a quick refresher by glancing at the magnet that Mill sends with your bin. Being forced to glance at the magnet every time we open the fridge really helps to normalize separating food scraps in my apartment’s kitchen routine. Scraping our plates into Mill is a reflex, just like the automatic reflex to throw a metal can into the recycling bin instead of the trash.

A typical day with Mill: Egg shells, old fridge leftovers, stale goldfish, and an apple core.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

Mill has also made keeping the kitchen smelling fresh so much easier. We don’t have a garbage disposal in the sink, so all of our soggy food remnants collect in a sink catcher, which I always dump directly into Mill instead of the trash. There, it doesn’t start to stink. Same goes with cleaning out the fridge — any time I uncover old pizza or an old takeout box that’s been pushed to the back, I can just toss it in Mill. To my surprise, pet food also gets the green light in Mill. My cats randomly turn their nose up at certain flavors and leave food in their bowls constantly, and I really needed an alternative to trashing it. Because if you think wet cat food reeks right out of the can, imagine how it smells after chilling in a trash can for two days.

Seeing the Mill magnet every time we open the fridge helps to internalize the general list of compostable items.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

Being able to search super specific items in the app is way easier than Googling.
Credit: Screenshot: Mill

I remember my days of saving food scraps in a bag in my freezer to drop off at my local food scrap collection location in Brooklyn. Having to follow so many rules was a pain in the ass. “No meat, no dairy or cheese, no fats or oils, no cooked foods.” OK, so do you have to completely trash a salad if it has a few drops of dressing on it? Are roasted vegetables fine or not? Are you not even going to mention grains? Also, nobody knows what the hell carbon-rich or nitrogen-rich materials are. Explain it to me like I’m 5.

Mill’s limitations are nothing like that. Most of the “no” section is composed of non-food items that seem like common sense. Some items are only OK on a case-by-case basis. If there’s confusion about whether something specific can or can’t go in, it’s almost guaranteed to be listed in the Mill app, where you can type in just about anything and get a solid yes or no answer.

The two most surprising things that can’t go in Mill are compostable plastics and plant clippings, such as fallen houseplant leaves and yard scraps.

At the end of the day, the fact that Mill’s list of accepted food items is much heavier on the “yes” side than the “no” side makes it much easier to remember to use it over the trash can in the first place, especially for the people in the household who aren’t the hardcore eco-friendly ones.

Shipping food grounds back is truly painless

Mill proves how much it really is consolidating your footprint by how infrequently you need to deal with the bin — it takes about a month to fill completely. Once the grounds weigh nine pounds and hit the green line inside, the app gives a heads up that it’s time to empty.

From there, your only job is to pack your milled results into one of the pre-labeled packages that should have arrived in a separate delivery. You’ll also receive plant-based box liners that look like giant Ziploc bags to stick in the box, which you’ll want to open as wide as possible. Then, just use the handle to lift the metal bin out of the Mill and dump it into the liner. It is a little heavy sometimes, but it only takes a few seconds. I use a butter knife to scrape off any crusty stuff.

The Mill bin is removable with handles for easy dumping into the box.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

The bag zips, so any smell will be sealed while you wait to add a second batch.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable

The shipping box can technically hold a few full batches, and Mill encourages you not to send incomplete boxes back. I literally just keep half-full boxes in a closet until the next batch is ready — the grounds don’t smell bad at all and are zipped safely inside the liner.

You can then drop your package off at the post office or schedule a USPS pickup — it’s just as easy as mailing back a return or shipping a Depop package. After that, your scraps are Mill’s problem, and you’re free to start filling the bin all over again. You’ll get an email when Mill receives your shipment, as well as some numbers calculating the environmental impacts of that singular pickup. It’s always cool to get tangible intel about my Mill shipments after I ship them.

Credit: Screenshot: Mill

Credit: Screenshot: Mill

Traditional compost feeds soil. Mill Food Grounds feed chickens.

The way that Mill processes your scraps on demand is so cool and so much more convenient than any other at-home composting solution. But that’s hardly Mill’s sole unprecedented flex: If you do choose to go the Mill pickup route with your food grounds, Mill is so dedicated to recycling food that it puts your food waste directly back into the life cycle — into the belly of a chicken, actually.

The beef that any average Earth enjoyer has with the beef industry is spotlighted by countless documentaries and Impossible Whopper commercials. While cow farming is by far the biggest agricultural hazard for the climate, it’s not the only livestock practice with a hefty carbon footprint. A study about chicken and salmon farming published by Current Biology in February 2023 asserts that much of the emission — as much as 55 percent — associated with poultry farming comes from feeding them.

Factory-farmed chicken feed largely comes from grain and soya. Growing either requires mass amounts of land (often gained through deforestation) and water. The boom of demand for soybean products (ironically, the main base ingredient in a lot of plant-based meat) from humans and now chickens, apparently, is an increasing area of concern on top of the demand for the meat itself.

The dried food dirt that Mill creates actually retains most of its nutritional value, and Mill founders realized that the milled results would actually work great as a base ingredient for chicken feed. As of February 2024, Mill even has a commercial feed license in Washington, where it can now distribute its upcycled chicken food to residents of the state.

So, by rerouting your Mill grounds into the hands of small farmers as an ingredient for their chicken feed, Mill’s closed-loop service can be thought of as an added measure of sustainability on top of the food scraps it diverts from landfills.

How much does Mill cost?

There are two separate payment options for bringing Mill home: Buy it for a flat fee of $999.99 or try it temporarily first by renting it for $35 per month. If you’d like to send your finished food grounds back to Mill, the Mill pickup plan is an extra charge of $16 per month (or $192 billed annually plus tax, on top of your buying or renting charge). There’s a buyout program if you do end up wanting to keep Mill.

A 12-month commitment is required with the rental plan. That comes with some perks, like an ongoing warranty and charcoal filter replacements throughout the year. I actually did have to replace my bin about a year ago, and it was a super seamless process. My original bin’s scale sensor broke after (I think) I slammed the bucket back into the bin too hard. I just emailed customer service, got to talk to a real person (not a clanker), and we arranged for the latest generation of the Mill bin to be shipped to me while I ship the old one back. The new one arrived within days, and the hardest part was literally just getting these 50-pound bins to and from the lobby of my building.

Here’s how the costs shake out: Renting Mill for $35 per month ends up costing $420 for a year, so paying the flat $999.99 to own your Mill is more cost-efficient after a little over two years. If you need Mill to deal with your food grounds for you (like I do), factoring in a Mill pickup subscription adds nearly $200 to your annual bill. Renting Mill for a year costs just over a dollar a day, while straight-up buying Mill costs almost $3 per day for the first year — that obviously tapers off eventually since it’s not a recurring cost.

No, the loophole you’re thinking of won’t work, either. You can’t simply stop paying for the service while keeping the bin for free. Rental cancellation is only effective once Mill has received your returned bin, which you’ll have 30 days to send back after requesting to cancel.

Mill vs. Lomi and Reencle: Cost is the main disadvantage

Having Mill in my kitchen has been such a positive, hands-off experience that it hasn’t really sparked any noteworthy complaints. But it’s still the most expensive at-home food recycling machine and/or composter. The whole “dollar a day thing” adds up quickly, especially when you consider that a single year of using Mill is more expensive than the full one-time purchase of an indoor countertop composter.

So if you’re interested in composting inside your home but aren’t yet set on the specific machine, your main options aside from Mill are countertop composters like the Lomi, Reencle, or Vitamix FoodCycler. They operate similarly in that they still do the composting inside your home within a matter of hours — they just hold a much smaller capacity and take up counter space instead of floor space. These three go for around $400 to $600 at full price, maybe dropping by $100 or so when on sale. Most home composters do require the purchase of filter and pod replacements every few months.

This isn’t to say that I don’t understand why Mill costs a bit more. It’s a much more elevated service than what competitors can provide, and you’re paying for the experts to deal with your finished grounds rather than having to figure out what to do with it. But I’d be remiss not to put it into perspective, especially with steady inflation making us more closely consider what’s a necessity and what’s not.

Countertop composters are also kind of a miss if you don’t have a garden. They otherwise suggest putting that finished compost in the green bin. You mean, the green bin and curbside composting system that a ton of towns don’t have? Suggesting taking them to a local compost drop-off location kind of defeats the purpose of having a machine to do the composting at home.

Putting a number on Mill’s environmental benefits

In a perfect world, a sleek, advanced system like Mill would be as standard in a home as curbside garbage collection is. Some places in the U.S. are kind of making strides: States like California and Vermont do have statewide mandatory compost laws in place. Cities like San Francisco, Portland, and New York City have similarly made composting mandatory for residents. But until composting is genuinely accessible to everyone, recycling food at home with something like Mill is still so impactful — even if you’re the only person you know who has one.

In case you’re blissfully unaware of just how detrimental our food waste habit really is, let’s get into it quickly. It’s estimated that the average American household wastes almost a third of the food it acquires each year, and that’s obviously not counting the contributions of food waste from businesses like restaurants.

When food rots, it produces methane: a gas that’s 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period after reaching the atmosphere. The combination of households, restaurants, and more creates 170 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions — equivalent to the exhaust 37 million cars would create.

This is a statistic that Mill is aiming to shrink. According to my app, it’s estimated that the Mill community has collectively diverted 11 million pounds of food waste from landfills to date. (That’s about a half-ton of greenhouse gas emissions at the single household level per year, on average.) Mill tells me that, over the past two-ish years, I’ve personally fed 64 chickens and kept over 425 kg of CO2e from being emitted into the atmosphere. Just think of the impact that could be had if Mill achieves its ultimate goal of expanding to the business level.

Is the Mill bin worth it?

Yes, Mill is absolutely worth it — considering I quite literally spent my own money to purchase the free test unit I was sent to keep using Mill after I was done testing it. It’s truly in a league of its own in the way that it’s currently the only at-home option on the market that offers to repurpose your food scraps for you, and is the only at-home food recycling option with a “no garden, no problem” solution.

Having Mill in my kitchen has made cleaning out my fridge so much less of a daunting task, though I’m not having to get rid of old food as often as I once was — because Mill just has an inherent way of making me more mindful about how I go through food in general. (A recent survey of other Mill users found that other people have had the same brain blast.)

And though the idea of it may sound like a big to-do, Mill is ridiculously straightforward and easy to use. It’s like an extra 13-gallon trash can in your kitchen that takes itself out. As a dedicated compost girlie over the past five years, I’ve done my time with the humble stainless steel countertop food scrap bin. I was in the trenches with those stenches for way too long. You can imagine how thankful I am that Mill is the way I get to do this now.

Mill simultaneously stirs hope and frustration because it shows just how easy it could and should be to not send every unwanted crumb from your kitchen to the landfill. Seriously, imagine if having a sustainable waste system like this at home was as normalized and accessible as trashing everything is. To me, it posed the daydream situation of how quickly America could turn its food waste shit show around if composting (or a composting-adjacent approach, like Mill’s) was funded on the micro level, rather than shifting the responsibility to the average person and whether or not they can figure out a convenient composting solution on their own dime.