Frequently asked questions

We can turn them into food for chickens

Don’t have a use for your Food Grounds at home? Send them to Mill so they can go back to the farm as food for chickens. Mill pickups include home pickup (just request it in the app) with postage-paid boxes and liners. We receive shipped Food Grounds at our feed manufacturing facility where we turn them into a safe and nutritious chicken feed ingredient through inspection, screening, heating, and blending. From there, they are delivered to a local farm.

You can use them to supplement your backyard chickens’ diet

Remember that your Food Grounds are a mix of the food you couldn’t or didn’t eat and best used as a feed ingredient, not a full feed. You likely want to include other feed in your chickens’ diet too. It may also be best to not add any foods that you wouldn’t feed directly to your chickens if you didn’t have a Mill bin— this is not the case when you send Food Grounds to us because concentrations of these foods in our final commercial feed are negligible, rendering them harmless.

You can use them at home

Just remember, they’re still food so you’ll want to properly compost them so they decompose before you use them in your garden. Otherwise they might overwhelm your plants, get moldy or attract hungry critters.

If you have Mill pickups enabled on your account, you have the option to send their Food Grounds to us whenever their bin gets full, in order to keep their kitchen scraps in the food system and out of the landfill. Prepaid return boxes, shipping fees, and scheduled pickups are all included in the Mill service plan. Based on our preliminary study, you can avoid about a half-ton of greenhouse gas emissions per year with a Mill service plan. Instead of filling the air with methane, your kitchen scraps are turned into food for chickens, going right back into the food system. Shipping We are partnering with USPS to ship Food Grounds because they’re already visiting almost every house, every day. And since Mill households will, on average, send just one box of Food Grounds every few weeks, USPS vehicles will have the capacity to manage the load. With this approach, every box of Food Grounds could be transported 15,000-20,000 miles (close to a trip around the world) before it could negate the benefits of keeping food out of landfills and avoiding methane emissions. Packaging For the Food Grounds packaging, we use a recyclable LDPE plastic slide-lock liner in a 100% recyclable cardboard box. Since we receive every box of Food Grounds at our feed facility, we’re able to inspect and sort the boxes for reusability and recycle the bags. We’ve partnered with a recycling facility to convert all of our liners into value added products, for example parking curb stops! We’re also actively exploring other sustainable packaging options. If you have any suggestions, please contact us. To learn more about the climate impact of an annual Mill service plan, please click here.

The Mill kitchen bin is manufactured at a LEED-certified facility in Guadalajara, Mexico. We prioritized manufacturing in North America to minimize the greenhouse gas emissions impact of shipping bins from the factory to the homes of our Mill customers.

Our manufacturer also requires their supply chain to commit to their Responsible Business Alliance Code of Conduct to ensure the health and safety of the employees at the facility.

We’ll be deliberate and thoughtful about our selection of potential farm partners, taking into account concerns about the environmental, welfare, and equity impacts of various production models.

We’ll share more about our progress later this year. If you have any suggestions, please contact us.

For the Mill packaging, we use 100% recyclable cardboard for the box and paper pulp for the interior. For the Food Grounds packaging, we use a recyclable LDPE plastic slide-lock liner in a 100% recyclable cardboard box. This solution offers Mill customers the most practical way to keep their Food Grounds and packaging out of landfills. You can read more about the climate impact here. Since we receive every box of Food Grounds at our feed facility, we’re able to inspect and sort the boxes for reusability and recycle the bags. We’ve partnered with a recycling facility to convert all of our liners into parking curb stops! We’re also actively exploring other sustainable packaging options. If you have any suggestions, please send them to us at mill.com/contact.

We consider conservation in every decision we make — from sourcing product materials to community outreach.

We’re internally tracking what we’re doing, what we consider, and how we’ll get better across each area of our business.

– Device production: building and delivering Mill kitchen bins for households. – Household participation: improving household kitchen experiences. – Service plan: improving Mill customer experiences. – Maintaining food pathways: enabling highest and best end uses for Food Grounds. – Overall: building Mill as a sustainable company.

We’re building an approach that covers: – What we do to stop waste. – How we prevent emissions. – How we help people.

This approach is embedded into our company onboarding program, our product development process, and our company-wide goals. We’re looking forward to sharing more about our progress. If you have any suggestions, please contact us.

We use a life-cycle assessment (LCA) to quantify the impact of an annual Mill service plan.

Prior to having data from households with Mill service plans, we prepared an externally reviewed Scoping LCA as an interim modeling effort. This is typically used to identify “hot spots” — areas of a process or business which are disproportionately impactful.

By publishing our initial estimates, we want to invite more people to help shape how we think and how we outsmart waste. To learn more about the climate impact of an annual Mill service plan, please click here.