Creating awareness

Since it was founded in 2011, CompostNow, Raleigh, North Carolina, has expanded into several states and offers organics collection and compost sales to businesses and homeowners.

Last year, the company diverted more than 15 million pounds of food waste from landfills, CompostNow Chief Impact Officer David Paull says. “That 15 million pounds diverted from the landfill turned into 5 million pounds of compost.”

Paull says CompostNow was founded out of a desire to return food waste to the earth in a way that’s beneficial rather than sending it to landfills.

“We’re great at growing food in our agricultural systems and getting that food to the consumer,” he says. “But we’re not very good at cycling the nutrients that we pulled out of the ground back into the ground, where they belong, rather than in a landfill.”

Education and advocacy

Although CompostNow’s operations have a multistate reach, achieving that kind of impact wasn’t easy or fast. Early on, the firm faced a daunting challenge: Not many people understood composting and its benefits, and few companies and organizations were advocating for its expansion.

“For the early days, a major challenge [was] that we were very involved in educating the market; we were very involved in advocacy work,” Paull says. “Because we started doing this so early on, there were very few … organizations advocating for this work or developing the market or doing policy work or legislative work. That was a necessary burden for the company, something we had to do, and we were able to move through that.”

Early education and advocacy work was an “all-hands-on-deck” grassroots effort, he says. The company attended farmers’ markets, homeowners’ association meetings and talked in churches and classrooms.

“We still do that today through our facilities,” he says. “There’s really no better way to understand the value of this work than by seeing it firsthand.”

Paull says he particularly enjoys working with children because CompostNow can be more creative in its education. He says the company’s early education efforts included having kids play “microbe tag,” assigning some students as carbon and some as nitrogen molecules.

“We ask kids at the end of playing tag with each other what it’s like,” he explains. “They’re saying, ‘I’m hot;’ ‘I’m tired;’ ‘I want water;’ ‘I’m breathing heavily.’ Those are all things you can use to teach about what’s actually happening biologically in a compost pile.”

Expanding interest

Since 2011, CompostNow has grown organically and through acquisitions, which include Atlanta-based CompostWheels and Durham, North Carolina-based Tilthy Rich Compost (TRC) in 2017.

TRC was founded in 2013 by Chris Russo, who hired Kat Nigro, CompostNow’s current chief experience officer, to run day-to-day operations. TRC provided weekly collections for households and businesses in Durham using a bike-powered fleet.

“After Kat Nigro analyzed substantial growth in 2015 after joining TRC, it became clear that merging efforts was the best play for the movement and the individuals involved,” Russo said at the time CompostNow acquired the company.

Paull says he founded CompostWheels in 2012, and the company joined with CompostNow in 2017.

“We have acquired other community-composting-type companies over the years, which has been a way for us to gain great talent who are very mission-aligned and highly motivated in this space,” he says.

The talent and resources gained through these companies have enabled CompostNow to expand geographically and increase its staff size to 90 employees, Paull adds.

Still, he says, the majority of CompostNow’s expansion has been organic.

“When someone starts composting, it’s hard to stop composting, and they feel really good about composting,” he says. “And they want to share that experience with their community.”

In the commercial sphere, Paull says CompostNow (and the compost industry as a whole) has benefited from recent regulatory changes and societal pressure to create a circular economy.

“There’re so many things shaping the trends on the commercial side of things around sustainability efforts [and] ESG [environmental, social and governance] goals within corporations,” he says. “Composting is a … low-hanging fruit in terms of a program that companies can do that solves a lot of problems.”

Paull says CompostNow has expanded beyond collection, also serving as a dealer of compostable containers and utensils.

“The compostable products [are] a distribution business that we operate to help with contamination in the waste stream to make sure that the integrity of the systems that we have and programs that we set up are solid, so that when this material gets to the composter, it’s the cleanest, highest-quality stream of material,” he says.

Improving logistics and customer service

Because much of its core business revolves around the logistics of collection, CompostNow’s founders—CEO Justin Senkbeil and Chief Technical Officer Dominique Bischof—decided the company needed to use dedicated software.

“There was nothing that they saw off the shelf that could be used for all the data management and the logistical aspects of what they were trying to build at that time,” Paull says. “So, more than a decade ago, they developed the first iteration of CompostNow’s tech stack, and that is both customer-facing and operations-facing. We’re tracking everything that’s being collected for managing our routes through the system. It’s been a key way that we’ve been able to scale the work that we’re doing.”

Residential and commercial customers have their own dashboards on the custom-built software where they can track their organic waste diversion, change their service, order soil or compost and more. Paull says CompostNow sends monthly impact reports to businesses and homeowners, with many commercial clients using the information in their ESG reporting.

“If you’re a member of CompostNow, it comes straight to your inbox and shows what you’ve diverted in a month, what the equivalencies are around that and then, even more importantly, what your community has done,” he says.

After years of growth in the industry, CompostNow is no longer alone in its education and advocacy efforts.

Now that the company and industry are more established, Paull says CompostNow is hoping to expand within its established geographical area.

“We see tremendous opportunities in public-private partnerships, both on the hauling side of things and the compost processing side,” he says. “So, for us, that’ll be expansion within the current markets that we’re in.”

The author is managing editor of Waste Today and can be reached at bgaetjens@gie.net.