Tester: Abbey Stone, senior commerce director
What I love: Many of the appliances folks refer to as electric composters are actually just dehydrators—they reduce the volume of your food waste by drying and grinding it down. Reencle’s products, however, use living microbes to create real compost that’s ready to be added to your garden.
I was nervous that the microbe thing would mean the Reencle Gravity would be complicated or messy to set up. Not so. Your device comes with a bag of compost starter, little rodent-feed-looking pellets of microorganisms derived from soy and cheese. You just empty the contents into your Reencle along with a small pouch of “compost booster,” add water, and close the lid. Give the machine at least 3 hours to get churning before you start adding your food.
From there, it’s really a set-it-and-forget-it situation. While many food recyclers run on “cycles” like a dishwasher (you tell it when to start, and then you keep it closed and running until the cycle ends), Reencle’s composters are always at work breaking down your scraps. This means you can open the lid to add food whenever you like. Once the bin starts to fill up—which took months in my two-person household—you scoop out the compost to the “minimum” line, leaving the bin about ⅓ full so that the microbes can continue doing their thing.
At nearly $700, the Gravity is undeniably expensive, but it’s less than the internet-favorite Mill Food Recycler. Also, Reencle often runs discounts and has two smaller models for under $500 in its product line.
Longterm testing notes: I’ve been using the Reencle Gravity for nine months now, and I’ve literally only emptied it twice. Granted, my household is just my husband and me, and we eat a lot of takeout. Once a year you’ll need to replace the appliance’s charcoal filter to prevent odors.
What I’d leave: The front of a machine has a motion sensor that triggers the top to open, an action accompanied by a beep and an electric whirring sound. This sensor, it turns out, is fairly sensitive. My husband and I would trigger it by moving our dining chairs; my dog would trigger it by sniffing. After a few weeks, the beep-whir got to be pretty annoying, so I put a piece of painter’s tape over the sensor and now stick to opening the lid via a button on top of the device.
Another slightly irritating quirk is that the top only stays open for 9 seconds. This is usually time enough to scrape what you need inside, but when you’re clearing a lot of dishes from dinner or scooping compost out of the machine, it can feel really quick. I’ve taken to taping the lid open when it’s time to empty it. (The Reencle doesn’t like this—it beeps at me when I prop the lid open for too long.) Ultimately, neither of these design shortcomings outweigh the appliance’s convenience.
