Every day, millions of people around the world perform a simple, seemingly harmless ritual, that without their knowledge is contributing to climate change. They take leftover or uneaten food and throw it into the garbage. Food takes up more space in US landfills than anything else, and homes are responsible for nearly half of the food in landfills. Thrown-away food (typically 80 to 90% water—so it’s heavy!) is usually sealed in a plastic garbage bag, loaded onto a truck, and driven many miles away where it is buried in a landfill. Buried in a landfill, we waste all the nutrients and resources that went into getting that food to our tables, and even worse, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period.
So essentially, our current system deploys gas-guzzling garbage trucks to drive around plastic bags filled mostly with water, which get buried in the ground where their contents turn into poison for the planet. This is a bad system. Mill replaces it with a better one.
From the team that founded Nest Thermostat, Mill is a household food waste prevention service that is better for your kitchen, and our planet. Mill’s membership-based solution makes it easy to prevent food waste at home while building an entirely new, closed loop in our food system that conserves the nutrients in uneaten food and gets it back to farms where it can feed chickens.
Every Mill member receives a Mill kitchen bin that dehydrates, shrinks and eliminates odors from food scraps overnight, turning them into nutrient-rich Food Grounds. Once the bin is full – which takes a few weeks – members schedule a USPS pickup for the Food Grounds in the Mill app and send them back to Mill where they can be turned into a chicken feed ingredient.
To tackle the problem of food waste, we need to create new habits at home and the key to behavior change is designing a product and experience that is practical and frictionless. The team designed the Mill kitchen bin to be not only a beautiful product that you’d be excited to have in your home but something that also creates a better kitchen experience. It was a conscious decision that the design lent itself to a traditional trash bin as a form factor, to encourage behavior change and make adopting a new system easy. Kitchens are architectural in nature, so the simplistic design and warm color spectrum were carefully chosen so that it could feel at home in a broad variety of kitchen styles. The pill shape is friendly and approachable, representing the circular nature of the product and the LED display interface is hidden underneath the wood veneer, so that the product doesn’t command attention from the user.
Mill offers people an easy, practical way to have a better, cleaner kitchen experience, reduce potent methane emissions, and participate in a circular loop that keeps food scraps in the food system, where they belong.
Category:HouseholdYear:2023Designer:Mill Industries Inc., San Bruno, California, USAManufacturer:Mill Industries Inc., San Bruno, California, USA
