How much trash do you generate in a week? Probably quite a few trash bags if your house is anything like ours.
What goes into your trash can? Does it smell? Yeah, we know. Ours does, too. And sometimes those darned fruit flies show up uninvited. (Hold nose as appropriate.)
But there are options for generating smaller mounds of trash, and even recycling the waste can be easy. Many people do use composting to get rid of trash. But what if you can’t, or won’t, compost? There is still a solution for you if you are ready and willing to spend $1,000 for a state-of-the-art Mill Food Recycler!
In brief, the Mill trash can takes food scraps and pulverizes them into what looks like coffee grounds, but doesn’t smell. Food scraps go into the Mill, internal air circulates and uses a charcoal filter to neutralize odors, dries the food, and grinds it up into a type of compost that can either be mailed back to Mill, or used as compost in gardens. It’s not complicated, after all it is a trash can.
Open the lid using a foot pedal, put in any food product (no bones or shells though). When enough food accumulates, the bucket heats up and the motor runs for a few hours at night, yielding non-smelly grinds. And, for an additional $10 per month, the grounds can be shipped back to the company, which then further processes them and provides them to farms for chicken feed or other uses.
But what’s that you say? You don’t have a grand to spend? Mill even has a rental plan for $30 a month, and you can buy it at the end of the lease.
Ready for a new trash can?
Group Activities and Discussion Questions:
- Discuss
- Show Mill website: https://www.mill.com/
- Show video of product in operation: https://youtu.be/ESuG7j00j9o?si=Yvmh3bb9Fcplp5F3
- Discuss the importance of clearly defining a target market.
- For this product, what is the target market?
- Divide students into teams and have each team develop a profile of Mill’s target market. (Include demographics, psychographics, behaviors, values, attitudes, etc.)
- Divide students into groups to work on this exercise.
- Have each team develop a marketing plan for this product. Make sure they select three different tactics. For each tactic, explain why it was selected and how it will be used.
Source: Merck, K. (18 August 2024). Review: Mill food recycler. Wired; Peterson, K. (29 December 2023). Will people pay to send their banana peels through the mail? Wall Street Journal; Rothman, W. (1 September 2024). I tried a $1,000 trash can for two months – and I get it. Wall Street Journal.
