Composting your kitchen waste has always been a good idea. With some communities now mandating the separation of food scraps from trash, it’s also a way to stay on the right side of the law.  But if you’re an apartment dweller, you might not have space for a composter or a compost pile.

Electric composters — also called food recyclers — offer a way out of this dilemma. Electric composters reduce food waste to a dry, soil-like substance you can safely put in your garden.

The amazing thing is, they do this in a matter of hours, not the months or even years it usually takes to produce compost. Plus, unlike a regular composter, an electric composter does its job while controlling methane gas emissions and odors.

Electric composters are fairly new, and performance varies from model to model. The quality of the resulting compost also varies, with only a few models producing a nutrient-rich soil amendment. Others produce nutrient-deficient, dehydrated food chips that are better as mulch than fertilizer.

All electric composters offer an easy way to keep food waste out of the trash, and they do so without attracting flies!

What Is an Electric Composter?

An electric composter is a kitchen appliance. Some are small enough for countertops; others are the size of a garbage can.

You use one like a regular compost pail: Open the lid, drop in the food, press a button and the composter does the rest. The composting cycle takes five to 48 hours, depending on model. Then you retrieve the dehydrated product from a drawer at the base of the machine and spread it in the garden.

Many companies producing electric composters are startups in the crowdfunding stage, but there are some well-reviewed brands on the market. With prices from $400 to more than $1,000, the decision to experiment with electric composting doesn’t come cheaply.

How Do Electric Composters Work?

Electric composters generally process food scraps in three stages.

• First, the device heats the scraps to a temperature of about 160 degrees, which kills pathogens and weed seeds. Heating continues until the food is completely desiccated,
• Then it’s ground up into granules.
• Finally, the compost cools before you remove it from the appliance.

Some electric composters tumble the food waste as it’s being heated it so it dries faster. Others offer separate compartments for the three stages, so you can add more scraps while the unit is already working on a batch. Still others feature more than one composting mode to process meat and some plant-based plastics as well as vegetable matter.

Most electric composters pass the air released in the drying process through a carbon filter that removes atmospheric pollutants and odors. An entire cycle typically consumes about 1- to 1.5-kWh of electricity, about the same as running an electric space heater for an hour.

The quality of the compost also varies. An organic starter should be added to the food scraps to produce soil-like compost that plants can use directly; some, but not all, manufacturers supply this. Without this starter, the final product is often devoid of nutrients but still suitable as mulch or filler.