Mill’s redesigned food bin is actually faster and quieter than before

When someone says a product is “new and improved,” it’s wise to take it with a grain of salt. But with Mill’s redesigned food bin, you can believe it.

As before, the bin accepts a wide variety of food scraps – only a handful of items like oyster shells are banned – and grinds and dries them to a consistency that resembles chunky coffee grounds . This soil can be mixed with garden soil, spread on lawns or even sent back to Mill, who then offers it to farmers as chicken feed. A household using the bin can expect to reduce around half a tonne of greenhouse gas emissions per year.

So what’s different? Almost everything.

Where the old trash can worked as promised, it wasn’t always as quiet or fast as I would have liked, sometimes taking almost a day to complete a food drying and grinding cycle. This is not the case with the new one, which I spent the last few weeks testing. Every night at 10 p.m., my trash bin would start a cycle, and by the time I woke up, it was always finished, just as co-founder Matt Rogers promised me. In addition, it is significantly quieter and no longer disrupts television viewing in the evening.

Here’s how Mill did it.

The brief was simple, said Kristen Virdone, Mill’s product manager: Each cycle had to be completed before breakfast. With this guide and a year’s worth of data under their belt, the team dug in.

From the outside, the new Mill bin doesn’t look that different. The visual changes are so subtle that you have to pay close attention to notice them, like when automakers change a model’s headlights to freshen up its appearance. Probably the biggest aesthetic change is that the status lights no longer shine through the wood-grained plastic cover, a nifty, timid piece of technology that I kind of miss.

Under the lid, one of the biggest changes users will notice is that the screws that grind the waste are now vertical instead of horizontal. This change allowed the team to make the bottom of the bucket flat instead of rounded, making augers easier to sweep. This also helped eliminate unwanted noise. Previously, the augers dragged food waste onto the curved bottom, creating what Mill’s team calls “haunted house noises.” (To me, it still sounded like a creaking, groaning pirate ship.) The new setup exorcised those demons.

The vertical layout also gave the design team the ability to add small paddles on top that users can turn to help dislodge soil as they empty the bucket.

The bucket itself is now made entirely of metal. The previous one had plastic parts, which reduced the amount of heat that could be transferred from the heating element to the food waste, thus lengthening drying times. To help the grounds slide, the bucket is coated with a PFAS/PFOA-free ceramic coating.

To further reduce cycle times, the Mill team was able to use machine learning algorithms trained on data collected over the last year, Virdone said. As a result, the new software is smarter about how long each cycle runs.

Each bin also has a suite of sensors, just like the previous version, although the team now has enough data to be able to differentiate the weight of one strawberry and four raspberries, said communications manager Suzy Sammons by Mill. Two humidity sensors, one on the air inlet and one on the exhaust, help the bin understand exactly how long each drying cycle should last.

“If you think about it, there are endless combinations of foods that can go in our trash,” Virdone said. “With a year under our belt and with real families making really weird food combinations, we’re starting to see the limits of what’s in there.”

The fans have also been completely redesigned, Virdone told TechCrunch. They are quieter and their location in the bin has been redesigned in an effort to minimize the amount of noise escaping from the unit. Overall, the changes worked well. Fan noise from the new unit was significantly reduced in my testing.

The only thing I noticed was missing from the new bin was an electrically activated lid. On the old model, pressing the pedal would signal a motor to quickly lift the lid. It was strangely satisfying to use, and my kids loved it too. The new one is a more traditional, linkage-operated lid, physically connected to the pedal, like a stereotypical kitchen trash can. Virdone said user testing found people preferred the mechanical lid, saying it was more intuitive than the motorized version.

Like the old trash can, the new one requires a nearby power outlet. In our house, that means the trash can technically resides in the family room, just a few steps from the kitchen sink. This works great in practice, although it seems a little out of place when you’re sitting on the couch. If I were to make it a permanent home, I would want to find it a home somewhere in the kitchen, perhaps adding another outlet in the process.

Other than that, the only thing stopping me from buying one is the price. At $360 a year, it’s not cheap, especially compared to my city’s unsubsidized curbside composting service, which is a third of the cost. Mill’s new price is about 10% cheaper than before, provided you have somewhere to dump the land. If you don’t, you’ll have to add $10 per month to get it back. It is possible that the price will drop if Mill can negotiate subsidies through the municipalities. Currently, the only cities with agreements with Mill are Pittsburgh and Tacoma, Washington.

Given the current cost, Mill’s trash can still isn’t suitable for everyone. But for households that don’t have curbside composting services or don’t like the smell that comes with them, this is a great product made even better.