Home Composting Robot: ABB Arms Behind Kitchen Recyclers

A home composting robot sounds like a gadget joke, but countertop machines now dry, grind and shrink the scraps from dinner overnight, and magazines test them for months at a time. This post follows kitchen waste from the compost heap and the wartime pig bin to today's electric food recyclers. It covers where robots already work in food waste and recycling, and which factory lines could use ABB robots such as the IRB 1200 Hygienic and the GoFa cobot to build these machines. It also covers what stands between a smart bin and a kitchen that clears itself.

Freshly added kitchen scraps in a home compost bin. Photo: Niwrat / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From compost heaps to the kitchen sink

Composting is old. Cato the Elder mentioned it in De Agri Cultura around 160 BCE, and farmers worldwide kept manure and plant waste in heaps long before anyone measured temperature or moisture. The first industrial station for turning urban organic waste into compost opened in Wels, Austria, in 1921. For most households the kitchen bucket and the garden heap stayed the whole system. It ran by hand, with a fork, a lot of patience and a good sense of smell.

A wooden compost bin with a heap of garden waste. Photo: Joe Hoover / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The kitchen sink got its own machine next. John W. Hammes, an architect in Racine, Wisconsin, invented the garbage disposal in 1927 and received US patent 2,012,680 in 1935. Many American cities then banned disposers over sewer worries, and New York City kept its ban until 1997. In wartime, scraps had another job. In 1943 the Women's Voluntary Service in East Barnet, England, collected kitchen waste as pig food, a sorting habit that shortage enforced on every household, long before anyone talked about climate or landfill methane.

Women's Voluntary Service members at a bin of salvaged kitchen waste, East Barnet, 1943. Photo: Ministry of Information via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots reached food waste from the other end, at the recycling plant. AMP Robotics builds sorting robots that pick items off a fast belt using machine vision, and its customer Waste Connections reported 50 of them booked or deployed since late 2020 on plastic, fiber and residue lines. Those machines sort packaging rather than scraps, and they are not ABB products. They do show that a vision guided arm can handle a dirty, wet and fast job that people once did by hand, standing at the belt all shift.

Cardboard and mixed recyclables on the floor of a materials recovery facility. Photo: Michael Barera / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Food recyclers and the robots that build them

Today the scraps go on the counter. Lomi, designed by the sustainability brand Pela, says a cycle turns food waste into plant ready material in under 24 hours. Mill says its bin dries and grinds scraps overnight, cutting volume by about 80 percent, and its 6.5 liter bucket needs emptying roughly once a month. Those are company claims, and Mill itself says the result is dry grounds, not true compost. Critics make the same point about drying, which removes much of what a heap would keep.

A countertop food dehydrator. Electric food recyclers also use heat to dry scraps. Photo: Matthieu Deuté / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The recent news follows that debate. Bon Appétit published a test of four kitchen composters over more than nine months in September 2026, and in October CNET covered a device that cuts food waste by 90 percent and is smaller than a microwave. On 3 October, UN News repeated that rotting food waste emits five times more greenhouse gases than aviation, a comparison from the UN Environment Programme's 2024 report, which also found households wasted a billion meals a day in 2022. A bin that keeps scraps out of landfill addresses a small part of that.

An anaerobic digestion plant in West London, where rotting organic waste is turned into biogas. Photo: Agrivert / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not sell composters, and no source we found says it builds them. The link is the factory. A food recycler holds a motor, a grinding chamber, a heater, a filter and a lid, small parts that a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot or an IRB 1200 can handle in a compact cell. Food plants already use the IRB 1200 Hygienic, built to be washed down, and the IRB 360 FlexPicker, a fast delta robot that picks small items off a moving line. Teams usually plan such cells in RobotStudio before any hardware arrives.

An ABB IRB 1200 Hygienic robot picking bananas, a food handling demo. Photo: ABB

Kitchens that clear themselves

The next step is a bin that works without being fed by hand. Picture a countertop unit that weighs each load, logs what you throw away and tells you how much food you wasted this week, which dish went uneaten and what to buy less of. The sensors for that are cheap, and the data is useful because most waste comes from shopping and cooking habits. The hard part is the arm. Opening a lid, scraping a plate and picking out a fork are small tasks for a person and hard ones for a robot in a messy, unplanned kitchen.

A 7 liter kitchen caddy for food scraps, hung on a bin in Wagga Wagga. Photo: Bidgee / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

That is why wheels will probably come before arms. A trash can robot already moves a bin to the curb, and the same idea could carry a scrap container from a kitchen to a shared compost point in an apartment building. ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs navigate factory floors with visual mapping and carry loads around a plant, which is the same job at a larger scale. Nothing here has been announced for homes, so treat it as a possibility only. The first versions would more likely appear in shared buildings, canteens and restaurant kitchens, where one machine serves many people and the cost is spread.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604 moves loads around a plant without fixed tracks. Photo: ABB

Open problems remain. Cost matters: a countertop unit has a purchase price and a power bill, so it competes with a free bucket and a city food scrap pickup that many towns now offer or are testing. Safety matters too, because grinders and heaters sit in homes with children and pets. On the factory side, building these units takes wiring, assembly and testing skills that suppliers must find. The wider use cases for ABB robots show that factories adapt first, and homes follow when the machine is cheap and quiet.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com