This Food Scrap Recycler Might Just Help You Waste Less

Wasting food isn’t just a local habit—it’s a global crisis. Around the world, roughly one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). That amounts to about 1.3 billion tons of food annually, valued at nearly $1 trillion. And while it’s easy to point fingers at institutions like hotels, supermarkets, and restaurants, the truth is that everyday individuals—regular consumers like you and me—are among the biggest contributors to the problem.

 

From households in New York to kitchens in Nairobi, daily routines are filled with seemingly small actions that collectively create enormous waste. We discard fruits because they’re slightly bruised, trim off perfectly edible parts of vegetables, or prepare far more food than we need, especially during holidays and celebrations. A big part of the issue stems from what experts call “human aversion”—rejecting food based on appearance, texture, or perceived imperfections. High cosmetic standards driven by consumer expectations mean that even minor blemishes on produce can lead to it being tossed away, often before it even reaches store shelves.

 

Lack of knowledge also plays a role. Many people don’t know how to identify when a fruit is ripe, how to prepare unfamiliar ingredients, or how to make use of leftovers creatively. Add to that the global confusion over expiration labels like “best before,” “use by,” and “sell by,” and it’s no wonder that tons of perfectly edible food are thrown out long before they spoil.

 

And what happens when we throw something “away”? Globally, food waste makes up a significant share of municipal solid waste. In many countries, it’s the single largest category of waste in landfills. In the United States, for instance, food waste accounted for 34 million tons out of the 250 million tons of waste produced in 2010—most of which was neither recycled nor composted. Less than 3% of food waste is recovered globally, while the rest rots in landfills or is incinerated, contributing to methane emissions and climate change. When adjusted for the recycling of materials like paper and plastic, food waste makes up around 20% of the total garbage we generate.

 

Yes, you may have switched to reusable straws or stopped flushing wipes to protect the oceans—but chances are, your kitchen habits still silently fuel one of the planet’s most pressing environmental disasters.

The ecological impact of global food waste cannot be overstated—and it’s been extensively documented. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), food loss and waste generate up to 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s more than the emissions produced by the entire aviation industry. In other words, if food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the United States.

 

And that figure doesn’t even include the additional emissions created when wasted food decomposes in landfills, releasing methane—a greenhouse gas with more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

 

But the impact isn’t just about the food that ends up in the trash. Every step in the food supply chain—from raising livestock and harvesting crops to processing, packaging, refrigerating, and transporting—requires enormous amounts of energy, water, and land. When that food is ultimately discarded, all of those resources are squandered as well. For example, producing just one kilogram of beef can require over 15,000 liters of water, and when that meat is thrown away, so is every drop of that water, along with the land and energy used to produce it.

 

This waste contributes not only to climate change but also to biodiversity loss, deforestation, water scarcity, and soil degradation. In short, food waste is not just a moral or economic issue—it is a full-scale environmental crisis.

Now that you’re thoroughly depressed, let me get back to that kitchen gadget: the TMK-2 Food Scrap Recycler.

 

The makers of the world’s best blender have created a device aimed at reducing food waste—and by “reducing,” I mean making smaller. With a countertop footprint similar to a premium ice cream machine, the TMK-2 Food Scrap Recycler “breaks down food waste into a tenth of its original volume and creates a nutrient-rich fertilizer you can add to your soil.

 

If you’re the type who collects food scraps in a too-small bucket that turns absolutely rank under the sink after a couple of days, you’re already familiar with the routine. The Food Scrap Recycler has a bucket of its own—mercifully sporting a lid with carbon filters, drastically cutting down on the ambient rankness in your kitchen—that you fill with fruit peels, vegetable trimmings, egg shells, and even chicken bones. Once it’s full, you place the bucket inside the machine, pop on a different (but also carbon-filtered) lid, and press one large button. Hidden from your eyes, the machine begins a process of heating, drying, and grinding all of those scraps, and somewhere between three and eight hours later, it will beep in triumph: Your food is now fertilizer.

 

At least, that’s what the promo videos make it look like. Could I transform discarded plant matter into dirt in a matter of hours, and never again deal with gooey effluvia leaking out of compostable bags as I hurry them to the scrap collection site at my local farmers market? One afternoon, I filled the Food Scrap Recycler bucket with the tops, tails, and skins of a half-dozen softball-size onions and set the machine a-whirling. The machine emitted the occasional faint mechanical noise as it stirred the contents of the bucket, but otherwise it was practically silent—just a low hum from the rear exhaust fan, which was also blessedly odorless. By that evening, my scraps had been reduced to a mere handful of brownish soil that smelled ever so faintly of onion-flavored chips.

 

Now, to be clear, what the Food Scrap Recycler does is not composting, which requires no electrical input but takes much longer to convert food into a soil amendment than this $400 device. Nor does it simultaneously improve soil health while sequestering carbon, which traditional composting does.

 

But if you’re an apartment dweller like me, without a backyard garden composting setup or a building with a food scrap collection program, the Food Scrap Recycler offers several benefits. No longer do I stash those disintegrating green bags in my freezer until Sunday, the only day I have the opportunity to drop them off. Now, I simply have a quart-size deli container that takes about a week’s worth of Food Scrap Recycler scrap fertilizer to fill, which I then mix with potting soil to feed my growing collection of tropical plants.

The other, and possibly more substantial, benefit of using the TMK-2 Food Scrap Recycler these past weeks has been psychological: I am more keenly aware of how much food I’m wasting, how much is going into that little bucket, and how long, under normal conditions, it would take to break down that food in a landfill. The TMK-2 isn’t going to stop you from buying too many apples or tossing your kid’s sandwich crusts; it only makes those foods take up less space in the world.

 

But purchasing a not-small kitchen appliance might, ironically, help some people start consuming less. If I fill up the TMK-2 Food Scrap Recycler bucket in one sitting, after prepping a meal for just me and my husband, I know that I’m probably creating way more waste than necessary. With that in mind, I’ve started buying less, only throwing away truly inedible food, and making sure to use the food I do buy before it ever reaches that state.

 

My goal, if anything, is to fill up the TMK-2 as little as possible—because every time I use it means that I’m wasting food and contributing further to the runaway rot of our planet. And with this big dirt-maker sitting on my countertop, that’s hard to ignore.

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