Under the Lid: Unpacking Mill’s Energy Usage

Mill makes it easy for people to keep food out of landfills. It starts with a new type of food recycling device that grinds and dehydrates food scraps while you sleep into clean, dry Food Grounds — plus optional pathways to get those grounds back to farms or gardens. 

We’ve received questions from customers who want to understand how Mill uses energy, and why. To answer these questions, we’re happy to take you Under The Lid:

How much energy does Mill use? 

Compared to other common appliances that many folks use every day to keep their homes and families running smoothly, a Mill bin uses a fraction of the energy. Energy usage varies based on things like household size, types of food scraps added, and volume of food scraps. Mill bins run intelligently, and cycles run shorter or longer depending on the amount added. Our energy usage numbers below reflect these real world conditions, and are an average across all of our second generation devices.

A typical 2nd Generation Mill bin uses ~0.7 kWh (kilowatt-hours) of electricity per day, averaged over multiple weeks of usage. To put that in perspective, a typical dishwasher uses about 1.2 - 1.8 kWh per load (~2x the energy usage of a Mill).

For a Mill bin, nearly all the energy consumed is during the Dry & Grind cycle as the bin heats up. A dry and grind cycle can be as quick as 2.5 hours, while the median bin cycle duration is between 4-5 hours. About a third of the cycle is a cooldown period, during which the bin uses very little energy. 

The cost of energy to use Mill depends on local energy rates. You can check your energy bill to see how much you pay per kilowatt-hour (kWh). At $0.178 per kWh (approximately the national average), it will cost around ~$4 to run Mill for a month. 

What impact does Mill have on greenhouse gas emissions? 

Mill is the only food recycling system that provides customers with optional pathways to get food scraps back into the food system as feed for chickens, or as a resource for farms (like in Phoenix). We’ve performed a scoping life cycle assessment (LCA) on the environmental impact of a year of typical Mill usage, considering the full product lifecycle – including the energy required to run a bin. A typical customer who sends their Food Grounds back to Mill for conversion into chicken feed avoids -521.1 kg CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) per year. To help make that number more tangible, that’s equivalent to the emissions of a 1300-mile road trip in a gasoline-powered car – about the driving distance from Boston, MA to Miami, Florida.

Customers’ total avoided CO2e by using Mill may slightly vary based on how you use your Food Grounds, your volume of annual food scraps, and the energy mix of your local electricity provider.

Announcing two new product updates: the Bin Energy feature & Cycle Frequency

Bin Energy

We’re excited to announce the launch of the Bin Energy feature on our 2nd Generation Mill Food Recycler bins, offering users visibility into their bin’s energy usage. In the Mill app’s Impact tab, in addition to tracking your cumulative and monthly pounds of food scraps, you can track your bin’s monthly energy usage in kWh from September 2024 onwards. Both mass and energy data are updated on a daily basis, giving you real-time insights.

Cycle Frequency

For those who want to make their bins even more energy efficient, 2nd Generation Mill customers who use their Food Grounds at home can also now change how often their bin runs using the Cycle Frequency feature. This allows customers to control the amount of scraps it takes for the bin to start a cycle at its scheduled time. Setting a bin to “More scraps, runs less often,” will reduce a bin’s energy usage by about ~20%. It’s like waiting to run the dishwasher when it’s full, rather than running it half empty. You can learn more about Cycle Frequency here. 

Why does this matter?

Tackling food waste is an incredibly easy step we can all take — right from our homes — that has a real impact on the planet. When food scraps break down in landfills, it releases the powerful greenhouse gas methane. As Ginger Zee, ABC’s Chief Meteorologist and Climate Correspondent, put it: “[Methane] is worse than CO2—it basically traps heat much more easily. So every time we’re throwing away something [in the landfill] that is organic, it is not breaking down and it is actually speeding up climate change.” 

That’s why it’s so important to keep food out of the landfill. Thanks for joining us Under The Lid, and Happy Milling!

¹Sources: Direct Energy & Inspired Clean Energy
²CO2e is a unit of measurement that expresses the impact of greenhouse gasses in terms of the amount of CO2 that would generate the same amount of warming. Mill’s CO2e figures are based on Mill’s scoping life cycle assessment