HOW TO CHOOSE A COMPOST BIN

You can compost for nothing ( zero pounds / dollars) by piling your garden and food waste up in a corner. How do you decide whether to pay 20, 60, 185 or even 900 pounds (yes really!) for a compost bin? You ‘justify’ the cash by convincing yourself of the ‘value’. We show you how to do this by checking the composting features meet your needs at a price you can afford.

Sounds like hard work – why not just go online, look for a 5 star ratings and best price – job done.

Well you can do this. Compost bins like the HOTBIN have extensive customer reviews. BUT most online reviews go like this: “arrived (did not arrive) on time, it was easy (or hard) to set up. I will let you know how it works in 12-24 months – but few go back to add. So make sure you look for the really important five star rating – the bits that says: ‘it works it gives me great compost, it does what it says on the bin – it hot composts fast’.

We can summarise the process of how do choose the ‘right compost bin’ or the ‘best compost bin’ for you into seven steps:

Step 1 – WHY
Consider & define your composting objectives
Step 2 – WHERE
Review your available space and location for the compost bin
Step 3 – WHAT & WHEN
Review the seasonality, volumes and types of garden and food waste you produce
Step 4 – EFFORT
Consider how much time and effort you are willing to invest on composting
Step 5 – HOW
Consider which compost method (eg hot, cold, digesters, vermicompost) and which bin features are essential and which are nice to have (eg low odour, no rats, no flies, in/out waste list, sanitization)?
Step 6 – CHECK
Build a compost bin feature checklist
Step 7 – MATCH
Asses which compost will deliver the best price/performance

Before we go any further, let’s consider your time and effort to read this blog and research composting. Some may genuinely have the time available and interest in composting to fully research the topic – you should read the detailed steps below and take a look at these excel sheets we made to create your own evaluation.

The simple one:

The complicated one:
(We will load this on the website for you to download but if you are desperate for a copy get in touch)

Please share how you got on and what you decide!

The majority of readers looking to buy a new compost bin probably just want a ‘fast track’ to help them make a quick decision with a degree of confidence that they are choosing a compost bin that works.  It’s not easy to fast track – there is no BSI standard, nor many user reviews of actual compost bin performance. If you are short on time, I suggest you skip the detail below and jump to the ‘reading between the lines section’ which has a few checks to help you gauge if the compost bin supplier has in depth expertise.

Step 1 – Consider your composting objectives:

• Do you want to make lots of rich/great compost for your garden that will improve its fertility and lessen/reduce your use of fertiliser and maybe even peat?
• Do you just want to keep the garden tidy?
• Do you want to make a more positive contribution to the environment by recycling all your food waste so your local council no longer has to collect and transport it to landfill or a central AD/IVC reprocessing plant?
• Are you just fed up with allocating more and more of your flower or vegetable patch to overflowing compost bins that never seem to do anything?
• What are your objectives on sustainability, organic gardening, good use of limited resources.

Step 2 – Review your available space and location for the compost bin:

• Some compost bins are limited in location (eg keep it in a sunny spot, or the opposite ‘keep it in the shade’, ‘only use on soil’, ‘do not use on clay soil’. You may have very little choice (eg it needs to go on the concrete by the garage). Your location may limit your compost bin choice.
• You might have a small garden and no space for a large compost bin, conversely you might have very large garden and taking 3 metre square for a traditional 3-bay New Zealand compost bin system might pose no issues.
• Do you want to the compost bin close to the kitchen so you can pop out easily in the rain to empty your food caddy?

Step 3 – Review the volume of garden and food waste you produce:

• Are you just going to compost seasonal garden waste (summer/autumn)?
• Do you want to compost grass cuttings (spring, summer, autumn)
• Do you want to compost food waste – produced all year round – ie compost through winter
• How much of each type of waste do you have? In my experience, very few garden composters or food waste recyclers accurately know how many litres (or Kgs) of waste they produce. Very few have any real desire to record and measure it either. Choosing the right compost bin size is also further complicated as compost bins can (given the right conditions to achieve ‘hot composting’) compost 32 times faster than a competitor bin that only facilitates ‘cold composting. So 20 litres of waste a week in one bin would rapidly break down within a week, but in another bin build up over time and need a 600 litre bin.

Step 4 – Consider if you want to ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ compost?

If you are unsure and want to learn more about ‘hot Vs cold’ follow the this link to Hot v Cold composting. The headline benefits of ‘hot’ composting over ‘cold’ composting are:

• Hot composting will destroy weed seeds – saving you time and effort in future
• Hot composting will destroy dangerous bacteria so you can compost all food waste
• Hot composting requires far less space to compost the same amount of waste
• Hot composting requires dramatically less time (eg 30 days Vs 360 days)
• Hot composting works all year round (cold heaps all but stop in winter, temperatures of 0-5C)

Step 5 – Consider how much time and effort you are willing to spend on composting:

This is hard – everyone tends to answer – ‘none / minimal’. The more a vendor knows this is critical to your choice, the more pressure to use the term ‘easy’ and the bigger the potential expectation gap and likely hood of user disappointment. There is always some effort (eg collecting food, turning, mixing, shredding). In our experience, things can be made very easy by habitually following simple method-steps. But investing the time to form habits can be challenging – especially at the start when people perceive the habits are taking more time not saving time.

So, now you have a clear picture of what you want. Next, how do you check and match the compost bin against your composting objectives?

Step 6 – Build a compost bin feature list:

Build a feature list, locate the top 10 commercial bins, score each feature, eliminate those compost bins that do not fit your needs to produce a short list; then weight/score the remaining compost bins to find the best match.

Step 7 – Asses which compost bin will deliver the best price/performance:

Rate (Score) the competence of each compost bin against each feature, ie establish the performance and derive and overall value for money score – the million dollar question!

Commercial Product managers do this kind of work as their day job – but it is likely very few composters, gardeners or food waste recyclers have the time or inclination to do this.

If you have both; follow this link to the ‘compost bin competitive evaluation sheet’. You will find 12 widely available compost bins types and brands professionally analysed. You can play around with the scores and weighting to see which you think is best.

Accepting the majority of readers will not want to do this; how do you ‘read between the lines’ and spot the vendor marketing hype (that’s the polite term!).

Reading between the lines:

1. The obvious choice is to seek user recommendations. As part of our competitive research we scan websites for ratings and reviews of compost bins. Often they just state: the bin ‘arrived/did not arrive’ on time, it was ‘easy/hard’ to assemble, followed by ‘I’ll let you know how it composts’. There are only a few reviews where people state: it delivered great compost just like the vendor said in X days.
2. Validate vendor promises… (eg compost in 7-days). Look for detailed scientific study from reputable independent organisation to support.
3. Check vendor expertise – does their website offer real in-depth hands-on composting advice or does it just regurgitate the same old ‘in/out’ list that applies to ‘cold’ composting without offering explanation for how it differs for hot composting?
4. Look for vendors with expertise in composting science & engineering. All composting (from the autumn leaf on the floor to an industrial scale IVC plant) obey the same laws of nature like cooling rates, rates/speed of biochemical reactions. Should you the consumer need to know about the science and engineering of composting? Of course not, but we believe your compost bin vendor does.

I said in the introduction, you can compost for nothing (£0s) by just piling stuff up in an open heap.  To justify the cash outlay you have to generate ‘value’ and you do this by checking the compost bin features deliver against your composting objectives at a price you can afford. We hope the above tips combined with the tools in the links will help you create ‘value’ and help you decide which compost is right for you.

In my opinion, as soon as you set an objective like ‘compost all food waste with low odour and no rats or flies’ or ‘compost using an easy recipe’; ‘compost fast’; ‘compost year round’ then you need a specialist bin that offers great performance at an affordable price.