Composting is one of the most impactful yet wildly inconvenient individual actions one can take against climate change on a day-to-day basis. The average person probably realizes, to a point, how much food waste their household is creating — the smell of the trash is a great indicator — but the environmental impacts of that food waste are pretty out of sight, out of mind.
Half of the problem is probably that many people don’t even know what composting is. It’s one of those words that might conjure up a vague mental image upon hearing — like a human-sized pile of dirt or a human-sized pile of worms — but doesn’t force any real-life consideration afterward. The idea of composting specifically is often blown off with a simple, “Does anyone actually do that?”
Pela is one company looking to make composting a more accessible, less gross process. The Lomi, a chic indoor countertop composter, offers an alternative between throwing everything away and committing to the whole outdoor composting operation. I simply had to clear off a slab of counter space to try Lomi in my apartment.
Putting the food waste problem on the average person’s radar
One needs to understand the food waste nightmare to understand the importance of composting.
While many of us probably twitch after watching someone toss a plastic bottle into the trash when there’s literally a recycling bin right there, tossing old refrigerator food or banana peels in the trash isn’t likely to generate the same visceral reaction. That’s just where it goes, right? The landfill will take care of it or whatever.
But the carbon impact of food waste is just as dire as that of the plastic rotting in those same landfills. Food waste makes up more than 20 percent of landfill waste, beating out any other single trash material. When food rots, the anaerobic conditions created in the process become a breeding ground for bacteria that produce methane as a byproduct of breaking down the food.
Data estimates that the average household wastes almost a third of the food it acquires each year. That, combined with food wasted at businesses like restaurants (like the perfectly good bagels they’re required to throw out at closing), translates to 170 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions. The World Wildlife Fund says that the food wasted by the U.S. alone generates emissions equivalent to what 37 million cars could pump out.
But, while the average person can’t help that much of their recycled plastic doesn’t actually get recycled — or that 20 big corporations create more than half of the world’s total single-use plastic waste in the first place — decreasing your food waste is a less-daunting personal climate action.
Composting, along with following a list (rather than shopping when you’re hungry) and remembering that expiration dates aren’t gospel, can significantly reduce the food-related trash your household produces, subsequently decreasing the amount of trash bags you go through, the spats over whose turn it is to take that trash out, and the smell that comes with nasty tossed fridge leftovers.
But composting won’t become the norm until it’s accessible.
Lomi rules because traditional composting drags
It feels weird to say this considering the effects of climate change will bring a whole new meaning to inconvenience, but traditional composting is inconvenient as hell.
The concept is easy enough on its face: Composting is literally just recycling. It’s the process of decomposing and converting organic matter (food scraps, leaves and yard clippings, brown paper products) into dirt-like, nutrient-rich fertilizer that can be put back into soil.
But up until a market for indoor electric composters emerged a few years ago, the “simple concept” of composting previously required serious outdoor space that could house a three-foot by three-foot-ish compost bin, manual churning over the course of a few months, at least a neutral stance on worms, and possibly the trickiest bullet point of them all: the motivation to do all that work in the first place. (Getting people to care about the environment past recycling a soda can is hard, OK.)
If you didn’t personally have that big yard but were still dedicated to the cause, you could hoard your food scraps and find a local place with a community composting program. Before Lomi, I kept food scraps in your average stainless steel compost bin or in a bag in the freezer (the latter smelled far less rank, but still isn’t an ideal storage situation). I’d eventually drop my collection off at places like BK ROT or Mom’s Organic Market: a chain grocery store that offers community drop-off bins for hard-to-recycle items like shoes, wine corks, glasses, batteries, and home compost.
Unfortunately, the rules of what is and isn’t accepted for traditional composting are pretty strict. Community drop-off places are typically using that aforementioned outdoor compost pile method, which is a dream for bugs and rodents. They particularly love the stench of decomposing meat and dairy products. So while it’s understandable that most collection places disallow pest-attracting items to keep composting streamlined, some folks may not be willing to memorize the list or separate their scraps at home.
Lomi makes composting as easy as loading the dishwasher
An autonomous indoor composter with a sealed lid makes all of this a moot point.
Lomi is really quick and easy to set up. The hardest part about it might just be finding the counter space for another slow cooker-sized appliance. Lomi even has a series of super thorough, straightforward Youtube videos that can walk you through setup.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable
The unit itself arrives already assembled, so your only job is to dump the included charcoal pellets into the inner and back filters. Both the Lomi Basic and classic Lomi come with a round of charcoal and a bag of Lomi pods. The pods feature “a proprietary blend of probiotics that improves the speed of degradation, the reduction of smell, and most importantly help to create the most healthy output to add to your gardens/lawn/planters.” The activated charcoal needs to be replaced every three months or so, and the machine will remind you when it’s time to swap. The good news is that the old charcoal, as well as the rest of the packaging that any Lomi materials arrive in, can be thrown into Lomi after unboxing.
What kinds of things can Lomi compost?
Lomi can compost the fruit and veggie remnants you’d expect, plus so much more that you wouldn’t expect. Your local compost drop-off spot could never.
Lomi’s main draw is the variety of food and non-food items that it can take off of your hands — without leaving the house, at that. The best part of the “yes” list is that it’s full of things that would typically stink up your trash can, like meat scraps or expired grub that someone forgot about. I got my roommates on board with using Lomi and it didn’t take long for everyone to get the gist of what can and can’t go into Lomi. The new addition to our routine quickly became second nature, especially with Lomi sitting on the counter right above the trash.
The only condition attached to Lomi’s flexibility is that the mode you choose matters. Depending on contents, you’ll choose from three modes by holding down the button on the front of Lomi until the corresponding picture lights up. Here’s a quick breakdown:
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Eco Express is the fastest of the options and is best for general raw or cooked food waste (leftover pasta, including lasagna, is a go). This mode takes three to five hours to complete.
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Lomi Approved is the most flexible setting of the three as it’s the only one that works with food scraps as well as Lomi-approved packaging like bioplastics (many clothing orders that come in the mail work here), paper products like brown CVS bags or paper towels, and other assorted compostable packaging that you never know what to do with. This mode takes five to eight hours to complete.
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Grow Mode is how you’ll get that nutrient-rich fertilizer that can be added back into a garden or houseplants, and it’s only meant for fruit and vegetable scraps. This mode takes 16 to 20 hours to complete.
Each cycle uses less than 1kWh, which is less electricity than one dishwasher load requires.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable
Pela’s “What can go into Lomi?” list was wickedly helpful when internalizing the items that get the green light. Whereas many composting do’s and don’ts use vague umbrella terms like “organic,” Pela names names. It notes that “paper products” includes things like paper towels and napkins, that “grains” includes bread, pizza crust, and even cereal (but without the milk!). Rinds can go in as long as they’re cut up, but very hard peels like a pineapple head should only be added in small quantities. Large packaging should be cut or ripped into smaller pieces.
There’s actually an entirely separate list for items that should go in sparsely, and a list of items that shouldn’t see the inside of Lomi at all. Common sense tells you that chemical-y non-food items like soap, metal, plastic, or glass still need to be thrown in the regular trash or recycling bin. Though meat scraps can go into Lomi, their bones can’t.
Lomi condenses a full bucket of trash to a handful of dirt
Note: The material that Lomi produces isn’t like the dirt you’d find in the ground. It’s dirt-adjacent organic output that can sometimes feel more like moist soil or dry, crumbly mulch with larger pieces in it. Lomi refers to it as “Lomi dirt,” so for lack of a better term, I’ll do the same.
I wish Lomi had a transparent window so I could witness what the hell goes on inside of this thing. Technically, “what goes on” is a mix of heat, aeration, abrasion, oxygen, and helpful bacteria from Lomi pods, with the smelly stuff neutralized as it’s pushed through the charcoal filter. But knowing the terminology involved in the process never curbs my fascination when I take the lid off, especially when I remember that Lomi achieves in hours what an outdoor compost pile achieves in months.
Not only is the sheer transformation to dirt amazing, but the downsizing of that matter is also something. Despite each batch almost always reaching the three-liter fill line, Lomi condensed our varietal heap to a cup or two of dirt. Pela estimates that it’s around an 80 percent reduction in food waste matter each time.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable
I didn’t know whether to expect Lomi to be obnoxiously loud like a vacuum or rumble more discreetly like the dryer. Its noise level is kind of in between, though the hum is broken up by occasional startling creaks and squeaks that could definitely be believable additions to a Halloween sound effect playlist. It’s giving Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
What do you do with Lomi dirt?
What went into the batch also determines whether or not the Lomi dirt can be used as actual compost. Dirt from both Eco-Express and Grow Mode can be added to plants — this can be a garden, your lawn, or indoor plants like I did.
Because of its bioplastic and paper content, Lomi Approved dirt is the only dirt that shouldn’t be added to plants. Of course Lomi Approved is the mode that makes Lomi so unique from traditional composting methods and of course that’s the mode used most frequently in my apartment.
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable
Credit: Leah Stodart / Mashable
Instead, you can toss the compost in a green bin (curbside or community composting) or simply trash it. But the green bin solution kind of cancels out Lomi’s draw in the first place. Anyone who has easy access to a green bin could just save $499 and put their scraps directly into the bin, and most people who are considering Lomi are probably doing so specifically because they don’t have access to a green bin.
As antithetical as it feels, putting Lomi Approved dirt in the trash is still saving space and preventing odor in your garbage can, as well as in the landfill. Decomposing is the most harmful aspect of sending solid food waste to the landfill, anyway, so sending matter that’s already decomposed at least skips that step.
Lomi’s personal and potential global impacts on waste are apparent immediately
My apartment’s management company can thank Pela for saving them from the extensive bitching I would have done over the nonexistent garbage disposal that we were promised. It’s been game changing to have Lomi as a place to ditch old leftovers, cooking remnants, and general plate scum that isn’t going to stink up the trash or gunk up the sink drain.
It didn’t take long for me to notice how much less trash my roommates and I were producing. The difference was even more glaringly obvious when I was a guest in other people’s homes and watching them trash every single crumb of food. Once you have the ability to compost at home, you can’t go back.
The way that Lomi deals with packaging is my personal favorite flex. My household lives a pretty low-waste lifestyle anyway, but it’s impossible to completely avoid the occasional paper towel or stack of brown napkins at the bottom of an Uber Eats delivery. Much of my low-waste swaps (like recycled cotton rounds) come in compostable packaging. I’m also currently using up some compostable cotton swabs since my cat knocked my reusable Last Swab off of the counter and into the fourth dimension. Now, there are no discrepancies between tossing and recycling. I just Lomi it.
I quickly saw how Lomi’s eco-friendly effect on this one chore in my household alone could add up across the 140,000 households (hopefully more by the time you’re reading this) that use Lomi. Pela’s 2022 Impact Report estimates that a year with Lomi could divert up to 803 pounds — the CO2 equivalent of saving 10 trees — in a single household. My number is probably a little less because we run Lomi less often than once a day and are creating Lomi Approved dirt a majority of the time. But the difference I feel like I’ve made in the past 12 months is tangible just based on how much slower our trash fills up. At any rate, Pela’s goal of eliminating 10 billion pounds of waste per year by 2028 doesn’t seem like a stretch.
Downsides: Recurring maintenance and recurring trial and error
Sometimes, rather than the loose soil-like dirt that falls out of the bucket when you turn it upside down, I opened the lid to a rock-hard residue that cemented to the inside of the bucket. It stuck in crevices that were nearly impossible to reach with any type of cleaning utensil and was so stiff that it prevented the arms at the bottom from spinning, rendering Lomi unusable. Only after days of poking and soaking (the second of which I don’t think is really advised) was I able to push the remnants out. Wrestling with brown Lomi mush is just about as appetizing as touching the wet food that collects in the sink catcher.
According to Pela’s community support page, I wasn’t the only one who experienced this problem, or the only one who had to order a new bucket because of the havoc the stubborn residue wreaked on the original. Community moderators noted that foods high in sugar content (fruit) or in starch content (bread) naturally congeal and harden during a heated breakdown process. I don’t remember the exact mashup my roommates and I had added to Lomi before experiencing the weirdly-solid consistency, but I do know the dirt has been pretty normal since keeping a stricter eye on the greens-to-browns balance of each batch.
Other issues had a more involved fix. In addition to the inner bucket, I had to replace the fan after Lomi stopped mid-cycle multiple times and hit me with an ominous beep and blinking light. I do like that Pela doesn’t make you guess what the problem is — the Youtube channel covers most ailments Lomi might display and what to do about them. Customer service was incredibly responsive and quickly filled an order for replacement parts get me back on track.
Those parts were free because my Lomi was still under warranty, but I can foresee it being annoying to couch up more money if maintenance issues occur past the one-year mark. Charcoal filters and Lomi pods will also be recurring costs, but those shouldn’t be more than $40 or $50 per 90 cycles.
But honestly, I swear the hardest part of using Lomi is getting the damn lid on correctly. It twists on and off in a similar manner to an Instant Pot, but requires a few attempts with a certain flick of the wrist.
Is Lomi worth it?
If Lomi ever becomes slightly cheaper, its status as the new kitchen staple isn’t far off. And millions of households adopting such a sustainable personal practice could be a turning point for emissions generated by food waste. Considering that more than 40 percent of food waste happens at the household level, electric countertop composters like Lomi could completely revolutionize one of the grossest household chores — diverting the carbon footprint of multiple pounds of food at the push of a button.
Lomi makes composting more accessible effort-wise, but misses the financial aspect of accessibility. As is the case with most novel tech products chilling in a market with few competitors, Lomi’s steep price isn’t necessarily unfair or unexpected. Unfortunately, in-home composting needs to not only be easy, but affordable to have a shot on most people’s countertops, and 500 bucks isn’t exactly that. Lomi is available at Amazon, which is nice — and it sometimes goes on sale.
But Lomi has so much going for it that makes the cost justifiable, even when accounting for a few maintenance quirks. It’s a seamless transition into anyone’s daily kitchen routine that makes composting approachable for the average person who wouldn’t bat an eye at food waste otherwise. Plus, the prospect of less trash and catching a whiff of old fridge food less often might be enough to pique your interest.
