Meet Lomi, the One-Button Composting Machine With More Than $3 Million in Crowdfunding Keep the worms in the ground and the pungent odors at bay while still giving back to the Earth.
By Entrepreneur Deals Edited by Jason Fell
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While composting is a guilt-free way to recycle food scraps by incorporating them into soil for your plants, there's no denying that it's also a hassle. For those living in apartments or urban areas, keeping up a routine means bringing worms into your home and, in turn, putting up with a foul stench that is difficult to conceal. Wait too long and your food could even start leaking through the compost bags, resulting in the need for a compost bin deep clean every time your busy work schedule gets in the way of lugging it over to a food scrap drop-off, assuming you're lucky enough to have one nearby.
To solve this problem, a number of composting machines have started to crop up including Lomi, a device that converts your food scraps into compost using a combination of heat, abrasion, and oxygen and achieving the same goal you would creating compost with earthworms—minus the less-than-desirable side effects. By fragmenting organic waste, the Lomi expedites the composting process at the literal press of a button. One button gives you complete control over the Lomi's power state in addition to cycling through its three modes: Express Mode, which breaks down food quickly in just over four hours; Eco Mode, which takes its time over a 20+ hour period to preserve the maximum amount of nutrients; and Bioplastic Mode, designed to compost a small list of approved plastics.
At only 16 x 13 x 12 inches, Lomi assumes the size of a small appliance (Pela, the company behind the product, likens it to a bread maker), but one that operates at much lower sound frequencies—between 40 and 50db compared to the 90db+ you would hear from a food processor. It's also not much bigger than an analog compost bin. Yet, despite its compact form factor, it can still contain up to 3 liters of waste at a time. With a dishwasher-safe stainless steel bucket inside, it's a breeze to clean, too. Not that you'll have to worry about that often since its charcoal-activated filters quash the powerful aroma of old garbage.
Coming from the creators of the "world's first compostable plastic phone case," it's no surprise that the Lomi is having its moment on Indiegogo, especially considering how novel an idea it is in the age of an ever-looming climate crisis. Still, surpassing its $50,000 campaign goal by 6,502 percent is a real feat of strength for a relatively new team of around just 80 people. Having earned more than $3.2 million in crowdfunding so far from over 9,000 backers, the stakes are high for Pela to deliver on its promises. To secure one for yourself, expect to spend a minimum of $379 for a single machine. Seeing as it's marked down 24 percent from the MSRP you'll see at launch, there is certainly an incentive to reserve a unit early, even if we are several months out from its estimated December 2021 ship date.
