Lomi Tabletop Composter Pilot Program
Ever wish you could compost your lunch leftovers?
Well now you can! Green Labs has installed 8 (yes, 8!) Lomi tabletop composters throughout campus, that work to turn your food scraps into compost dirt in just a few hours! The Caltech gardens uses this compost to fertilize our beautiful grounds!
Read more about this initiative below and check out our other Pilot Programs.
Lomi Tabletop Composter Program
Did you notice our Lomi tabletop composters in some BBE kitchen areas?
Green Labs has deployed it's first Pilot Program! We have installed Lomi tabletop composters in the three Chen kitchen areas, a kitchen in Broad, and a kitchen in Beckman Institute in an effort to tackle food waste at Caltech. We will collect data on the usage of these devices to encourage adoption of sustainable lunchtime practices for labs in BBE. In just a few hours per run, these Lomi composters transform our food waste into usable compost dirt that our gardeners are able to use to fertilize the lovely gardens here at Caltech!
Update: Since April 2023, we have diverted about 2890 kg (6371 lbs) of food waste! The Lomi composters have reduced that food waste to about 577 kg (1274 lbs) of dirt that the Caltech Gardens are using to fertilize the wonderful campus grounds.
Here are what our Lomi tabletop composters look like!
They LOVE to be filled with various kinds of food scraps. See the good-quality compost dirt that is produced by this little guy?
Our plan: The composters are going to be run by Green Labs colleagues as needed ~5 pm – 10 pm to make usable compost dirt. If the composters are full or running, we will have small compost bins available beside the Lomi for people to add their food scraps to, or satellite bins that folks can fill up for transport to a Lomi. Signs indicating what can and cannot go into our composters are posted near the garbage cans and near each Lomi. We will be collecting data to show just how much food waste we are producing, and how valuable this food waste can be if diverted correctly. We hope to use this data to encourage Caltech to adopt more sustainable practices and invest more heavily in composting programs on campus.
We eventually want to make the machines available to "borrow" for large events (coming soon!), so if you have an event you'd like to borrow one for, please let us know and we will try to make it available!