The Sunday Question: Do Bokashi Bins Work?
Have you heard of the Bokashi Bin? It’s an indoor composting system that sounds ideal for busy parents of young children. The product makes the following amazing claims:
- It can handle meat, dairy, bones, and produce scraps!
- It’s odorless
- It’s small 5 gallon bin will easily fit in your kitchen. (The company recommends buying two so that after one fills up you can let it sit for ten days while you fill up the second, always rotating back and forth.)
- The “tea” or liquid runoff it produces comes out of a handy spigot at the bottom and is great for your garden or houseplants.
- Food breaks down to a “compost product” that can be dumped outside in just ten days. (Apparently it’s the texture of hummus and smells pleasant!)
- All it takes to activate this wondrous system is a sprinkle of Bokashi—which is made up of water, wheat bran, molasses, and microbes that break food down quickly.
But is it all true? How can you be composting meat and dairy inside and really have no odor? If does all it claims, can high rise apartment dwellers actually compost? What would they do with that “compost product” since they don’t usually have outside space? We’re both fascinated with this product but want to hear from someone who has actually used it. Thanks for your input!
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March 15th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Hi.
Not only have I used Bokashi for some time, we’re also in the process of introducing the concept in Sweden where I live. I’m an ex-kiwi — Bokashi has been going strong in NZ since 2000 and is now part of everyday life for most people.
There’s no doubt about it, Bokashi is a godsend for the environment. It keeps food waste out of landfill and returns it to the soil where it belongs.
The buckets are easy to use, and yes you can add everything, even shrimps and fish bones. And it’s true — there’s no smell other than a quite ok vinegary one.
The beneficial microorganisms in the Bokashi mix you sprinkle on teh food do all the work, they break down the food waste into its component proteins, amino acids etc. That means that when you get it into the soil it is ready to go for the plants, prepared in a format their roots can take up directly.
It’s really important to not though that after your Bokashi bucket has fermented for its compulsory couple of weeks it will still look like food. It won’t turn into soil until it comes into contact with soil — that’s why you have to dig it into your veggie patch (a few cm under the surface) or add to your compost. But you’ll be amazed how quickly the soil microbes will finish off the job, you’ll have rich delicious soil full of worms in no time.
If you add it to your compost, you’ll get a better compost — faster, healthier and less smelly. Again, its the microbes that change the usual rotting process to a healthy fermentation one, much more in keeping with nature.
So DO IT by all means! Get yourself a Bokashi bin and join the movement! This tide is not going to turn — when its this easy to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, why wouldn’t you?
/JennyH
ps quite a lot more info on my blogg here:
http://bokashiworld.wordpress.com
March 16th, 2009 at 6:54 am
My guess would be that somewhere in there it has a charcol filter to deal with the smells.
Apartment dwellers could use it on house plants, share with driends who have more space, or sell it. There is always vermicompost on my local craigslist.
March 16th, 2009 at 7:23 am
Hi, me again. Nope, no charcoal filter. You sprinkle over a handful of Bokashi bran each time you add food waste to the bucket. There are billions of “good” microorganisms in each handful, and they go to work on the food. I know it sounds incredible (and I was very sceptical at first too) but it actually does work. You just get a gentle vinegar smell when you open the lid, no big deal.
Millions of people are using this around the world, so that speaks for itself.
Worm farms are great but Bokashi is easier, a lot more forgiving and its no trouble to go off on holiday and leave it. The runoff juice is great for fertilising houseplants (and in the garden if you have one).
If you live in an apartment you’d need to know someone with a garden or an allotment who’d be happy to take the contents of your bucket every 2 to 4 weeks. Any gardener worth his salt will love you for it. You can also use it in balcony planters etc, mix 1:4 with potting mix and you’ll have much happier healthier plants.
Just my two cents worth.
/JennyH
btw all the EM Bokashi microbes are on the FDA’s completely harmless list. They’re out there in nature anyway, its just that in this combination they do rather a good job.
March 16th, 2009 at 7:40 am
It’s just an anaerobic digester with microbial additive (as shown on this site http://www.bokashi.com.au/). It’s not complete decomposition and requires 4-8 weeks of trench composting to complete the process. It’s not as magical as it sounds. A simple worm bin would be more useful for apartment dwellers as they wouldn’t need to do the trench composting step. Granted, it’s nice that you can compost dairy and animal products in it, but I think you could set up your own bucket off to the side next to your worm bin and add worm tea to the meat/dairy bucket to anaerobically digest those products. That’s just speculation. I’ll update this post once I try that idea.
March 16th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Jenny and Aaron,
I’m so glad you’ve had first-hand experience with bokashi bins! Our real question is what should people who don’t have access to outdoor soil do? With bokashi bins can they flush their “compost product” down the toilet? I know it can be used on houseplants, but you must have to have quite a few to process all of it. With worm bins is the compost all digested so that there are no bi-products? Any tips you could share would be a great help!
March 16th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
The last thing you want to do is just “get rid of it”. Food waste really should become soil again otherwise there’s no ecocycle. We’re losing good growing soil all over the world, eating it up and throwing it out in the form of food waste; in the end it obviously doesn’t hold.
In New York many people take their Bokashi bins down to the local allotment garden. A godsend for the folks trying to get things to grow in urban soil. In NZ I’ve heard of a number of cafes with their own gardens who are happy to receive Bokashi. In Japan where life is so dense that small farms and housing co-exist, housewives give their Bokashi to the local farmers and receive a basket of veggies in return. In Thailand and Korea there are urban council collections of Bokashi food waste; you couldn’t do this without Bokashi because the rat and stench problem would be too great.
Given that you only have to empty a bucket every 2 to 4 weeks, I’m sure most apartment dwellers could find a community solution. There’s always a gardener at work, a neighbour with an allotment, a father-in-law with a veggie garden. It’s up to us to find the creative solutions and solve this tragic waste of what should be good growing soil.
/JennyH
March 19th, 2009 at 6:03 am
we have a bucket in our garage in the colder months that we use to put scraps in–when it’s full we put it in our big compost bin in the yard. I can’t praise composting enough–it’s helped are garden soil tremendously and it doesn’t smell at all.
May 23rd, 2009 at 6:57 pm
good info…thanks n keep posting!!!
August 10th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
I used the bokashi bin, and it really worked. for me it was a good solution, and i really encourage people to try it!
February 18th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Bokashi works great for me. I’ve been using it for quite some time now and it is very satisfying to see my kitchen waste being cut in half.
Thanks for a nice read,
Roel
February 19th, 2010 at 11:44 pm
My condo has a very small back yard, so I could probably find a place to bury the compost. This would be labor-intensive for me as I am disabled, but I am motivated to give this a go.
My question is: How do I keep my dog from “investigating” the burial site?
February 20th, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Judy,
I just found a blog that talked about the same problem. The author dumped the bokashi contents into a compost bin so that they’d be safe from the dog. Also, you might be interested to know that several blogs wrote about using the bokashi bin with dog poop. It sounds odd but it would be nice if it worked!
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Hey, you say there is no odor… We have been trialling this at school and had a real problem with the smell… fine until you open the container, but as soon as we took the lid off… Yuck! Probably one of the most disgusting smells in the world!
So possibly we’ve done something wrong… Any advice?
July 23rd, 2010 at 9:23 am
What quantity of coffee ground will the Bokashi method handle? In our house, we make one or two pots a day. Will a bokashi handle that much acidic “stuff”? Thanks.