The Best Compost Bins

Two chambers is the whole point: you keep adding to one side while the other finishes, so you get a batch out instead of a bin that is never quite ready.

The single-chamber problem is why most first composters give up. You keep adding kitchen scraps to the same bin, so the contents are always part-finished, and you can never take any out.

Two chambers solves it mechanically. Fill side A until it is full, then switch to side B and leave A alone. By the time B is full, A is finished compost you can empty in one go. In warm weather that cycle runs in a matter of weeks.

Understand the capacity limit going in. Around 37 gallons total is generous for kitchen scraps from a household, and small if you also want to compost lawn clippings and autumn leaves. Those belong in an open bin.

Skip it if: you generate a lot of yard waste. A tumbler is volume-limited by design, and a big open pile handles leaves and grass far better.

Barely a product -- a sheet of perforated plastic you roll into a circle -- and by far the most volume per dollar in composting.

If your composting problem is autumn leaves and grass clippings rather than kitchen scraps, this is the answer and a tumbler is not. Volume is what yard waste needs, and 216 gallons of volume costs less here than 40 gallons costs anywhere else.

The adjustable diameter is genuinely useful: start it small so the pile stays deep enough to heat, and expand it as the material accumulates.

Keep cooked food, meat and dairy out. An open bin with no floor is accessible to every rodent in the neighborhood, and the standard advice on that is not squeamishness, it is experience.

Skip it if: you are composting cooked food or meat. An open bin is an open invitation, and this one has no lid and no floor.

The middle ground: more volume than a tumbler, a lid and a floor unlike an open bin, and no turning mechanism to go wrong.

A static bin is the traditional answer and it still works. You add material at the top, it breaks down, and finished compost comes out of the doors at the bottom months later.

The lid is the reason to choose this over an open bin. Composting needs the mix damp, not saturated, and an uncovered pile in a wet climate turns into an anaerobic, sour mess.

If you want it faster, fork it over every few weeks. Turning is what a tumbler does mechanically, and doing it by hand gets you most of the same speed for none of the money.

Skip it if: you want compost quickly. A static bin without regular forking is a year-long process, not a three-week one.

A worm bin that works indoors year-round, which is the only real option for an apartment -- and worm castings are better than compost anyway.

Vermicomposting is the answer to two problems at once: no outdoor space, and winter. A worm bin lives under a sink or in a garage and keeps working at room temperature when an outdoor pile has gone cold and dormant.

The stacking system does the sorting for you. Worms finish a tray and migrate up toward the fresh food in the tray above, leaving finished castings behind to lift off.

Two habits make the difference between an odor-free bin and a bad experience: feed small amounts, and keep the bedding damp rather than wet. Smell is almost always overfeeding.

Skip it if: the idea of keeping worms in the house is a hard no. It works, it does not smell, and it is still not for everyone.

Small, tidy, and the base collects the liquid that drains out -- which is the part people actually want and most tumblers throw away.

Most compost tumblers look like equipment. This one is designed to be tolerable on a patio, and if the reason you have not started composting is that the bins are ugly, that is not a frivolous objection.

The base is the functional difference. Liquid drains out of any active compost and normally disappears into the ground; here it collects, and diluted heavily it is a perfectly good feed for container plants.

It is a single chamber, so you will still hit the part-finished problem. The workaround is to stop adding for a few weeks and let a batch finish, rather than topping it up forever.

Skip it if: you want volume. This is a patio-scale machine and it will not keep up with a productive vegetable garden.

It is a grinder and dehydrator, not a composter -- but if the alternative is food waste going in the trash, the output still improves your soil.

Be clear about what this machine does, because the marketing is not. It grinds and dries food waste. Composting is a biological process that takes weeks; this is a mechanical one that takes hours. The output is pre-compost -- a soil amendment that still needs to finish breaking down in soil or a bin.

That does not make it useless. Food waste in landfill breaks down without oxygen and produces methane; the same scraps dried, ground and dug into a bed do not. For an apartment with no balcony, that is a real improvement over the trash.

It is the most expensive way to process a kitchen's worth of scraps, both to buy and to run. If you have a yard, put the money into a tumbler and a bag of worms instead.

Skip it if: you have any outdoor space at all. A $30 bin outdoors makes better compost than a several-hundred-dollar appliance makes on a counter.

The unglamorous item that determines whether you compost at all: if scraps are inconvenient to collect, they go in the trash.

Compost systems fail at the kitchen end far more often than at the bin end. If collecting scraps means opening a cupboard, finding a container and then washing it out, the scraps go in the trash instead.

What makes a caddy work is mundane: a lid you can flip open with one hand while the other holds a chopping board, and an interior with no corners so a rinse actually cleans it.

Empty it every two or three days regardless of how full it is. Nearly every complaint about a smelly kitchen caddy is a caddy that sat for a week.

Skip it if: you would rather keep scraps in the freezer, which is free, smell-free and works perfectly well.