Best Countertop Compost Bins, Tested & Reviewed (2025)

Once the domain of organic communes and college-town vegan restaurants, composting has become an increasingly normal part of municipal life in the U.S. More cities are adopting mandatory composting—notably New York City this year—and interest in composting at home has grown alongside.

If you, like many of us staffers at BA, live in an area where composting is required, you’ve probably had to pick up some new habits in the kitchen when it comes to food scraps. Yes, there are many ways to make your own compost at home, like with a tech-y food cycler or a bokashi compost system, but if you have no use for finished compost or no space for a compost pile, you’re better off just dumping your fruit and veggie scraps in the city-provided bin. For that, you’ll need a designated receptacle for food waste separate from your trash bin and recycling. This is where countertop compost caddies come into play. These compact, convenient containers serve as the in-between step before scraps make it outside.

Some might be satisfied with a simple bowl on the countertop or a baggie in the freezer, but if dumping scraps every time you cook isn’t realistic, or you consider your freezer to be premium real estate, you’ll want a kitchen compost bin that can handle a few days’ worth of scraps.

Best countertop compost bins

We tested a range of countertop compost bins to get a sense of how well they functioned as food scrap intermediaries. The perfect design was elusive, but we found a couple of designs that get the job done, all while minimizing household odors. Read on for our top picks for best compost bins, plus how we tested them.

Best countertop compost caddy with bags: Joseph Joseph Stainless Steel Compost Caddy

What we love: In a crowd of imperfect siblings, this compost caddy offered the best user experience out of the caddies designed for bags. While not without its flaws, it did a great job minimizing mess and odor when tasked with transporting a full bag from the kitchen to the outdoor compost bin (or city collection bin).

The unique feature of this caddy is a removable internal bin with its own handle in addition to the exterior handle for the entire caddy. That means you can bring the whole caddy outside, pop out the inner bin, dump your scraps, and return the caddy into the kitchen without risk of leaks.

Why does this matter? When we surveyed compost caddy users, minimizing smell was the most important issue for people. There are two ways odors seep out of these bins: passively as they sit on the counter, and in stronger bursts each time you open the bin. The latter is more responsible for unpleasant smells, especially because your face is close each time you open it.

This caddy limits that by letting you do the whole disposal process outdoors. Similar caddies, which secure the bag with a ring attached to the outer lid, require two hands to remove before you can remove the bag. Doing this inside means a longer amount of time spent with the compost caddy open to the air, and doing this outside was more cumbersome and tedious to do. As for passive smells, this caddy did better than average at keeping them contained.

Overall, if you don’t like dealing with odors of rotting food, this caddy will spare you from having to do so to a greater degree than others out there, and will look nice as well.

What we’d leave: The dual-bin setup that makes this caddy so great is also what makes it a touch annoying. Putting the bag on the internal bin is a bit fussy. You’ll need to lift the internal handle to attach a new bag, and when you set it back into the outer bin, the edges of the bag can bunch up. This is especially true if you’re using a generic bag instead of the custom bags Joseph Joseph designed for this caddy. Usually, I’m against bags with bespoke dimensions for trashcans, but since compost caddy bags aren’t as easy to find in stores, you’re probably going to have to order them online anyway, so you might as well get the ones designed for the caddy. Overall, if you’re sensitive to smells, this is a small trade-off worth making.

Best bagless compost caddy: Epica Stainless Steel Bin

What we love: This compost caddy is made of metal, which is more durable, easier to wash, and won’t absorb odors compared to plastic. All of this matters if you’re going bagless, as batch after batch of rotting food and vegetable scraps can degrade plastic over time. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, it doesn’t look hideous.