I spent $350 on the hi-tech Lomi compost bucket to prove I’m a good person

👋 Good morning from Los Angeles! I'm Nate Kadlac, and this is Plan Your Next—a Sunday newsletter that connects design, creativity, and how you prepare for your next thing.

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Writing is tough. And sometimes, we run into our internet friends we’ve never met in a Whole Foods parking lot and commiserate on how difficult it is to write these damn things. I’m pretty sure

Alex Dobrenko`

was writing in his car minutes before bumping into me, leading me to also scribble some notes into my iPhone so I could feel like a real writer. My notes were likely not nearly as funny as his, so you should definitely go read his newsletter if you want to read very funny things.

But, right before I walked into Whole Foods and spent five minutes too long trying to find cottage cheese because everything in the dairy section is organized to drive us mad, I let Alex know I would not be publishing something new today. He nodded and then spoke silently with just his eyes, “That’s completely normal and I support you.”

Then he told me how he’s trying to get ahead by writing 43 amazing new pieces, and it made me think that the secret to writing might be to write in my car in a Whole Foods parking lot.

We parted ways, but with Alex’s silent blessing, I will be resharing one of my favorite pieces from a year and 1,550 readers ago.

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I spent $350 on the hi-tech Lomi compost bucket to prove I’m a good person

I can be a wasteful person. But I want to be better. Rather than improve on this shortcoming, I bought a $350 kitchen composting machine to tell myself that at least I’m doing something.

Food waste is real, people. Especially with kids.

My daughter’s appetite is the dark matter of our family; it’s there, but I can’t begin to understand it in a meaningful way. I can’t predict it or manipulate it. Who knows how much or what it will crave on any given day?

I’m at its mercy.

‍See what I did there? I’ve already set the stage to defer my own garbage guilt onto a one-year-old who can’t even talk. 

If we were serving her ice cream every day, nothing would go to waste, because I’d be willingly present to finish the scraps. But between broccoli, chicken, black beans, pasta, turkey, beets, and carrots, some days she wants more, some days less. Same as all of us. Right?

And that’s just the waste from someone who doesn’t even have a say in the matter.

My failed composting history

For the past eight years, my wife and I have lived in some pretty small apartments without a traditional way to compost. You know the ones: the large garbage bins that spin in the backyard, letting Mother Nature bring life back into your waste.

Living apartment to apartment in Los Angeles doesn’t give us that much space, so if you’re looking to virtue signal, your options are limited to the form of a pretty small tin can. 

When we did compost, we used a small $20 stainless steel canister from Amazon. It fits about two and a half meals and requires custom compostable bags that never really fit. A simple Google search showed that using rubber bands around the top is how the DIYers do it, but they failed to mention how undoing a rubber band from an overflowing food waste container feels like dismantling a bomb. 

The small bin would fill up every other day, forcing you to dutifully march back and forth between the compost bin and the kitchen. Dumping the sloshing pile of food scraps into a bigger bin inevitably leaves food waste on your hands or clothes.

This went on for a few years. Then along came our daughter. While I could blame everything on her, I won’t. But curiously, I haven't composted a damn thing since her arrival. 

I’ll pause while you gasp.

It’s now been about a year since I have lived secretly in shame, letting the small tin can from Amazon sit in the corner, unused out of pure laziness. 

The moment when I try to redeem myself

While searching online, I came across the $350 Lomi compost bucket (I was a first-adopter sucker who bought it during a presale—it’s $500 now!). I’m not sure why I decided this was a normal amount to spend to be viewed as a climate-conscious person, but I’m sure some part of it was trying to make up for the fact it had been almost a year of not composting. Of course that was all my daughter’s fault.

But what really drew me into it was that you could compost your scraps down into healthy, nutrient-filled plant soil. 

Being a mediocre plant dad, I suddenly thought I could make up for lost time. I could compost my scraps, and feed my leafy green friends at the same time.

Plant life at casa de Kadlac. Don’t look too closely.

The apartment-sized Lomi compost bucket

What the Lomi does is break down food scraps—and bio-degradable packaging (!)—into nutrient-rich soil. And it does all of this on your kitchen counter, while plugged into an outlet. It’s fast-forwarding a natural process, kind of like when nature reveals organic matter decomposing at time-lapse speed.

There are three settings to choose from. The first is one you can use for plant soil, where it takes a bit longer—24 hours—by using less heat and keeping the nutrients intact. They refer to it as Black Gold. 

The second setting is the default, which takes about 4-6 hours. The end result is still soil, it’s just not suitable for your plants. 

The third setting is one that you can use for biodegradable plastics. Even the Lomi packaging itself can be cut up and composted right inside the damn thing! (Because I’m horrible, I didn’t read about this setting until it was too late and everything was recycled.)

In all three modes, you end up with incredibly dry dirt you can safely walk out to your city-issued compost bin without the mess. Or in my case, to breathe new life into our potted plants. 

Overall, it reduces the volume of food waste by up to 90%, so I can compost almost a week’s worth of scraps without walking it out. And it doesn’t smell because of the tight-fitting lid. Well, it smells, but like an armpit after not wearing deodorant for half a day.

With most of these tech gadgets, you always wonder about their shelf life, and if the thing breaks—which it inevitably will—it ends up being just a giant bin for food scraps like we originally had. 

I honestly can’t predict what will happen, but they do tend to push the three-year extended warranty for this, so I’m getting a bit nervous. If it ends up in a landfill, then I’m worse off than where I started. As of writing this, I have not researched whether I can buy a new Lomi and let it compost itself. I’ll file this as a feature request in the next software update.

While I may regret this decision later, it’s been fun to use in the same way that deleting an email is fun. You press a single button and the machine responds with a beep, signaling you’re doing a good thing. Then immediately, it starts to whir and gently fill the kitchen with a not-so-subtle white noise, grinding organic matter into Black Gold.

Aesthetically, it’s as if Apple designed the product, with its stark white exterior and shiny white power cable. The size is about twice the size of our old tin can, but it nestles nicely into the corner without being an eyesore.

The large Lomi compost bucket is suited for small spaces

This machine breaks down organic matter. It breaking down my sense of well-being was just a bonus.

But take my review with a grain of salt…

To give this not-so-serious review some authenticity, I asked my wife how she liked it.  

‍“I’m not sure it’s worth it.”

‍I guess this is where I’ll promise to do a future update that never gets written, like my daughter’s appetite, which will be difficult to predict.

There you have it. Lomi—a gorgeous yet overpriced compost bucket that signals to everyone—and to myself—that you’re a better person. Pre-order now for $500, a price increasingly outpacing national inflation levels. Ouch.

May 2023 Update: I still feel like a good person using the Lomi and Alie still despises it. And I’m pretty sure this sucker costs well over $500 now.