I am a compost guy. Always have been. I love muck in all its many forms. My number one hobby is growing things. So, naturally, I want to turn my food waste into soil. I was pretty sure I had been around the block several times by now and seen all the composting tricks in the book but this was surely hubris. The Reencle home biodigestor has now landed in the UK and changed the landscape considerably.

https://youtu.be/kPL\-TlPxAiA?si=no\-2Fj3vx9RF77\-L

Before I lived in Somerset, I lived in London and there I had a space saving wormery. This triple deck, black, plastic Darlek could devour food waste. All kinds of organic matter went in at the top and the worms climbed inextricably up and through the layers until it had been transformed into rich, black worm casts that made heavy, dense, dank, moist plant food. On the downside, it was big and messy and needed to sit outside. One frigid winter the whole vessel froze and my entire colony of worms was wiped out. Lifting the lid, looking on my works, despairingly viewing the carnage on my hands, I knew I needed to find another way.

As soon as you have a little garden, a wormery seems overly complicated. In a garden you can just chuck your garden trimmings and kitchen waste into a heap and pee on it. One year later, Bob is your uncle, you have your compost. The limitation here is that you wouldn’t put cooked food waste or animal products in your compost heap - they will attract rats.

Kitchen composting just got sexy

So, over the last few years, in our home, we have had two kitchen caddies - both messy and smelly. One, is for the kitchen scraps that can go in the garden compost heap. The other is cooked food waste which goes out into a small brown bin that is collected by Somerset council and sent by fossil fuel powered truck to a municipal bioreactor where it is turned into compost. This compost can be bought back by householders - should their growing needs require it.

In contrast, my mum lives in Cambridge. Shockingly, Cambridgeshire council does not collect food waste. My mum and step dad still religiously scrape the leftover food off their plates into the REGULAR BIN in some kind of arcane sacrament to the Anti-Christ of climate change. I have explained that this organic waste does not have a cycle of reincarnation ahead of it. The black bin bag will go to the landfill. The food waste will rot anaerobically. Methane will be released which has 80 times the climate forcing impact of CO2. No nutrients will be returned to the living fabric of our world. Cooked food discarded in this way is a ticking climate timebomb with no redeeming features.

Just pop it in

My mother is not concerned. She reads the Daily Telegraph and thinks Net Zero is an evil communist plot and Ed Miliband is as bad as Stalin. But does it bother her, I ask, that these precious food waste nutrients are not being used to boost the blooms of her favourite roses? She raises her eyebrows and thinks things through. Her mother was a Land Girl in World War Two. Efficiency, self sufficiency and an ethos of - Dig For Victory - are in her DNA. The thought of squandering important food nutrients into the dismal abyss of a landfill is clearly a sin. “Fine… what are my options…”

I never had a satisfactory answer to this… until now…

About 2 months ago I was contacted by Reencle. They wanted to know if I was interested in reviewing their high-tech, all-in-one, home compost machine. Well, of course, I was intrigued. I went onto their website and saw the machines cost £500 and was flabbergasted, fascinated and highly sceptical.

“Yes please” I said. “Send me one over to try out and I will write about it”. I was already rehearsing the vitriolic takedown. “How on this Gorgeous Green Earth can you mass market and monetize composting? It is a joke. Compost happens… for free… without fear or favour, outside your window… just make a heap…”

I decided that I would use the Reencle for a month or two and then take it to my mother for her to use. Her need is greater than mine because her council services are stuck in the Dark Ages. The problem is, after two months of use, if anyone wants to take my Reencle off me… they will have to pry it out of my cold dead hands. My bioreactor and I have bonded and the relationship is deep and profound.

I have been completely blown away by this awesome bit of kit.

The Reencle is bigger than I expected. It is a heavy, squat, compact machine that looks like a compact fridge or tumble dryer. It is easily assembled and comes with spare filters. I had mine set up in under ten minutes. Inside its belly, shiny metal rotor blades reveal some of its machine capacity. In the belly of the beast intense action takes place.

Something got me started

The machine comes with an impressively complex starter mix of living organisms and substrate that is activated by water. I enjoyed firing up the mix and was excited to see it change over the first 24 hours. Then you can start adding food waste. This is when I began to lose my shit. You can put in ANYTHING.

It feels so weird tipping into the mix: bones, cheese rind, cooked food and lemons. I am fascinated to peek back in several hours later and see how the digestion is progressing. Within days there is no evidence of the diverse food waste that came before. Just rich, moist plant food being churned on the daily.

I spoon out the pleasantly fragrant output and smugly refill pots and beds in the garden. I didn’t know I needed a Korean-made biodigester, but it has changed my life for the better in numerous ways. Our kitchen is cleaner, my list of chores is shorter and my plants are blooming. Composting is still a key part of my daily activities but now it happens quicker and more effectively. The cycle of life is great. It has given me something to think about that can be enhanced by a clever machine.

Find out more here.

Get in there!