Reimagining food waste in the Rust Belt

Since hauling its first load of food waste for composting in 2014, Cleveland-based Rust Belt Riders has grown to become a notable company in the fight for sustainability in Northeast Ohio.

Co-founded by Cleveland native Daniel Brown and Michael Robinson, whom Brown met in Chicago while attending DePaul University, the company was created to bridge the disconnect between food waste generators and local agriculture.

“We were working at a restaurant; we had started a community garden, and we just sort of saw a disconnect between those two … disparate efforts,” Brown says. “There are these amazing businesses all over every major city feeding people, often sourcing really thoughtfully from regional farmers, and then there was this … burgeoning effort of people to grow food in their own community.

“We thought it would make good sense to try and connect those two efforts in a … physical and tangible way,” he adds.

In 2013, the newfound partners left Chicago and set out to Ohio to bring to life their concept to collect and compost food waste and sell compost to community farmers and gardens. After gauging interest from nearby restaurants, Brown and Robinson sought to create an easy, low-cost method to collect and haul food waste— ultimately opting for bicycles equipped with custom trailers.

Now, almost a decade later, Rust Belt Riders’ operations look much different.

Changing streams

In the years following its launch, Rust Belt Riders quickly spread its roots throughout Cleveland and its suburbs, offering food waste collection services to businesses and residential customers.

With a fleet of cargo vans, box trucks and smaller vehicles, Rust Belt Riders services more than 20 cities through pickup and drop-off operations, as well as local businesses such as Phoenix Coffee Co. and Great Lakes Brewing Co. While the company has experienced great success through its commercial operations, it recently has placed greater emphasis on residential collections after being hit hard by a drop in commercial pickups during the pandemic.

“When pandemic restrictions took place, we very quickly overnight lost like 85 percent of our revenue because restaurants were closed, schools were closed, offices were closed,” Brown says. “That was primarily … our bread and butter as to where we were seeing most of our revenue.”

He says turning to residential collections during this time helped the Rust Belt Riders “keep our lights on.”

In recognizing that an over-reliance on commercial collections wasn’t sustainable for the company long-term, Rust Belt Riders began building out its residential programs to reach a broader market. The company also diversified its revenue streams through the launch of its soil product, Tilth, which is made from food waste the company collects.

“[The pandemic] was a learning opportunity for us about what kinds of commercial accounts make the most sense to really be tailoring our services to,” Brown says.

Grocery stores, in particular, have played a key role in broadening the company’s commercial accounts. In 2021, Rust Belt Riders added the Cleveland-based grocer Heinen’s to its customer base—servicing 18 locations multiple times per week.

“In service of our mission of trying to keep as much food out of the landfill as possible to improve our food system, grocers presented themselves as this ‘aha moment’ for us to really try and find a way to provide our services to [large-scale food waste producers], and Heinen’s, I think, has shown a tremendous amount of leadership in believing in us and working with us to help advance that mission,” Brown says.

In addition to Heinen’s, Rust Belt Riders has announced a suite of partnerships in the past two years with notable venues such as Cleveland’s West Side Market, Blossom Music Center and Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse. The company also has partnered with Seattle-based Starbucks and Newport Beach, California-based Chipotle to collect food waste at their Cleveland-area locations. Brown says partnerships with national brands and large establishments have acted as a pivot for the company to redefine the qualities of an ideal client.

“Lots of material at fewer locations tends to win out, within reason,” he says of the company’s methodology. “It’s been really heartening to see … some of these … larger, national companies demonstrate a commitment to reducing food waste, specifically, Starbucks and Chipotle, [which have] many locations across northeast Ohio.”

When larger companies commit themselves to environmental issues, their scale enables grassroots organizations like Rust Belt Riders to grow, Brown says.

It takes a village

In the past two years, Brown says Rust Belt Riders has almost doubled the volume of food waste it collects. To facilitate processing and composting, the company relies on partnerships with compost facilities within its service areas.

“We are continuing to work with any and all compost facility operators because, as much interest as there is in using our services, we need the facilities and infrastructure in place to accommodate the processing of that material, and ideally have that be a little bit ahead of where interest in our services are,” he says.

Currently, the company works with the Cleveland-based Rid-All Green Partnership, which operates a Class II composting facility; Independence, Ohio-based Kurtz Bros., which operates two compost facilities; and with another Cleveland-area organization to help establish a new Class II compost facility.

Kurtz Bros., a bulk material management company, handles most of the food waste Rust Belt Riders collects at its facilities in Independence and North Canton, Ohio. To keep pace with continuing volume growth, Rust Belt Riders also plans to work with Rid-All to expand its existing capacity. As for the planned facility, Brown says Rust Belt Riders is in the process of securing a permit for a Class IV facility in Lorain County, Ohio, which would process yard waste.

“We hope to build on the success of the Class IV facility to turn it into a Class II facility so that our region gets even more food waste processing capacity,” Brown says. “If all things go well, we hope that [the] facility can be processing food waste some time in 2023. In the meantime, we’ll be using that facility for a lot of our mixing and blending of our finished soil products, which have quickly become one of the more significant sources of revenue for our organization.”

While Rust Belt Riders’ composting operations are more scattered than Brown might prefer, he says he hopes to streamline the company’s food waste processing in the future.

“I think the prevailing point here is we need perhaps dozens more of these facilities around Cuyahoga County to really begin making an impact, and … we’re really interested in how we can help to establish new facilities,” he says.

A circular mission

Launched in 2018, Tilth soil is the newest arm of Rust Belt Riders’ offerings. The company processes roughly 3,000 tons of food waste per year and transforms its finished compost into five soil products available for purchase through Tilth.

In pursuit of the company’s mission to create a usable product from local food waste, some of Rust Belt Riders’ clients have made commitments to buy back finished compost for use in landscaping. For example, the Cleveland Clinic—a longtime client of Rust Belt Riders—has purchased Tilth soil for use in landscaping and tree maintenance at its properties throughout the city.

“The use of local compost made from food scraps generated from those Cleveland businesses and residents seems like a really cool opportunity to align synergies for economic development, public health, stormwater [and] air quality,” Brown says.

“A lot of this is still very much in the early days, but I think we’re seeing some really interesting glimmers of hope with some of our commercial accounts.”

The author is the associate editor of Waste Today and can be reached at hrischar@gie.net.