A major climate change culprit is hiding in your kitchen: food scraps. Apple cores, carrot tops, and uneaten bits of dinner are a surprisingly potent source of emissions, spewing methane as they decompose in landfills. Mill, a stylish garbage bin (really!) meant specifically for food scraps, dehydrates and grinds them up into a fine, odorless powder. After the bin’s release in early 2023, the company sold out of its initial production run of thousands of Mills; a second, optimized version of the bin is coming out this spring.
Mill is a lighter-lift alternative to kitchen composting, which is often challenging for urbanites and notorious for conjuring fruit fly infestations. Mill’s ground-up food waste empties into a shoebox-size, prepaid mailer, which takes about a month to fill. Users can then send the waste to the company to be rerouted back into the food chain as nutrient-rich chicken feed that Mill now sells to small farm partners in Washington state, after receiving regulatory approval in January 2024. The entire cycle cuts emissions and reduces municipal waste management costs.
Designing lust-worthy hardware to inspire climate-conscious behavior change has become a specialty of Mill cofounder Matt Rogers. A former Apple software engineer, he co-created the pioneering Nest smart thermostat, which helps homeowners and renters better control their energy use. Akin to how Nest partnered with utilities to accelerate adoption, Mill initiated two city-scale pilot projects in Pittsburgh and Tacoma to prove out the emissions and financial savings of processing food waste this way.
Mill launched under a subscription model that runs about $1 per day, and customers now have the option to buy the device outright for $999. If Mill succeeds in getting more cities, building owners, and even companies to integrate it into their waste management practices, those organizations will subsidize or absorb the cost of the device. With city-run compost collection programs struggling to take hold, Rogers sees Mill as a cost-effective and, crucially, easier way to divert food scraps from the waste stream. “You can’t start at the curb,” says Rogers. “You need to do it at the kitchen level.”
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