Market Forces
You’d think that in a metropolis with five million people,
with hundreds of garden centers and hardware megastores
visible from the motorways, a guy with $150 burning a hole
in his pocket could buy an expensive composter. Before
I started looking, I took it for granted that every gardening
center stocked composters because I live five miles from
the birthplace of Alice Waters’s Delicious Revolution and
organic gardening is part of the local elementary school
curriculum. It’s the perfect marketplace for upscale
organic gardening supplies, but composters are conspicuously
absent, as my fruitless visits to six large garden centers
indicates. If I desired, I could buy $10 buckets of
ladybugs, $500 Japanese maples or spend a couple of grand
on recycled teak furniture, but I was out of luck when it
came to high-priced composters.
All over the Oakland Hills, Grandchildren of the Sixties
are paying over half a million to move into starter houses,
where they soon will be tending to their first gardens.
Unless it’s the dead of winter, most barely let the ink
on their mortgages dry before going on a shopping binge,
snapping up rakes, tool sheds, weed whackers and other items
that will clutter their yards and garages, while getting
only occasional use. If composters had been available
when we went on our binge, I certainly would have bought
one instead of a tool shed.
Apparently, though, there’s no market for expensive composters,
because if there’s one thing that Americans are good at,
it’s exploiting a market. Perhaps it’s because some
cities allow you to recycle food with the garden waste,
or maybe its that the Farmers’ Markets that are springing
up in every community have rendered backyard vegetable gardens
obsolete. Most likely, though, composters suffer from
the success of the gas grill. When stores allocate
display space for bulky gardening items in the $100-$600
price range, darn near 100% goes to gas grills, even though
a stickler could argue that they don’t belong in a garden
center.
The
internet is another matter. If you don’t mind paying
a pretty penny for shipping, there are plenty of options.
Composters.com,
for instance, offers some sixty varieties, mostly with silly
names:
Names That Suggest the Rise of the Machines is Near
Bio-Orb
U-Roll System
- This is a big plastic ball with holes that you stick waste
in and roll around your yard.
Scrap
Eater Living Machine - This won’t be threatening
humanity anytime soon, as its primary component is a recycled
Bordeaux barrel. To be fair, it is the prettiest composter
on the market because you can plant flowers around the rim.
Earth
Machine & Earth Engine - These are not machines,
nor is there anything “enginey” about them; one is a big
box made out of wood and plastic, the other is just plastic.
Flowtron
Expandable System - You have entered the game grid
of Flowtron! This looks like a promising composter,
but it’s nothing more than a polyethylene box with large
holes. If something is called Flowtron, it’s got to
have a little more panache.
RotoTherm
CrankTec System - Weighs in at 110 pounds, costs
$559 and is a vivid green. With three vertical rotating
screws, this is as complex as composters get, but did the
RotoTherm people really need to use both RotoTherm and CrankTec
in the name? Isn’t one miscapitalized fake word enough
for a bunch of green plastic?
To
be continued...
Copyright,
Jeff Lewis, 2005.
Jeff
can be reached at jeff@babblog.com. |
