Mission-driven

Since 2014, Tennessee’s Compost Nashville has been on a mission to divert compostable materials from landfills and return finished compost to the local community.

The benefits of composting include reducing landfill waste and methane emissions and promoting healthier soil, but not everyone has the space or desire to compost at home. That’s where Compost Nashville comes in.

Making composting accessible and easy

“We want to grow food and not landfills,” says Catarina Muschaweck, director of communications at Compost Nashville. “We try to make it incredibly easy for folks to compost who either find it confusing or don't want to get their hands dirty.”

Photo courtesy of Compost Nashville

The company offers a subscription service to residents of middle Tennessee, which includes the cities of Nashville and Franklin. It also services businesses and events.

Compost Nashville co-founder Micah Puncochar served in Peace Corps in South America and Paraguay after college and saw firsthand the power of vermicomposting, which uses worms. “I was a small business cooperative volunteer where they grew, harvested and processed yerba mate.”

After a stint in corporate America, Puncochar started a landscaping business and noticed that the backyards in Nashville were becoming smaller and aesthetics were driving homeowners’ decisions about how to best use their space. That meant they didn’t want an unsightly compost pile in their yards, though they said they wanted to compost, giving him the idea to start providing that service. “Instead of doing two or three years of market research and visiting other places in America that were doing this, we just said, ‘Let's start it on Monday.’”

The company’s other co-owners are Matthew "Beadle" Beadlecomb, General Manager Spencer Sherrill and Jeremy Lekich, who along with Puncochar is responsible for commercial sales.

Ninety percent of the company’s customers are residential, Puncochar says, with Compost Nashville serving some 3,000 households and 100 businesses as well as several events throughout the year

Event composting is a growing part of the company’s service offering, Muschaweck says. “I think that with more attendees being more sustainably conscious [and] with the rise of compostables, we've seen a lot more folks interested in event composting.”

Photo courtesy of Compost Nashville

Compost Nashville has 16 employees, 11 of whom are drivers, and 7 vehicles that it uses to collect compostables from residents and two vans to service commercial accounts. The company delivers the compostables it collects to a composting facility in Ashland City, Tennessee.  

When residents sign up for service, they receive an email from the company confirming their collection day through stopSuite, cloud-based software for managing customers, routes, drivers, timesheets, pre-trip inspections and vehicles; a welcome kit that includes a 4-gallon collection bucket and fridge magnet with instructions of what is compostable; and welcome letter. Rates start at $29 per month, and customers can choose from weekly or biweekly collection options.

Once a resident has started composting through the company, Muschaweck says that if Compost Nashville notices contamination in a bin, staff will photograph the offending items to send to the resident, along with a friendly reminder. “We're really trying to make sure that that education is happening and that the slight shift from tossing your food scraps into a trash can to tossing them in a green bin is really easy and streamlined,” she adds.

The most common contaminant the company sees from its residential customers is plastic bags, followed by ice cream containers. Muschaweck says, while they are made from paper, ice cream containers have a plastic liner that makes them unsuitable for composting.

Compost Nashville sees a wider array of contamination from the commercial companies it services, which includes restaurants, coffee shops, hotels and florists, Puncochar says. “Because there's so much turnover in the hospitality industry, we offer complimentary training when people onboard.”

If contamination starts becoming an issue with a commercial account, Compost Nashville will visit the establishment and talk with the staff, reminding them of what is acceptable and what is not.

Tracking impact

Contamination is not the only data point that Compost Nashville tracks. “Data is really important to us,” Muschaweck says. “We weigh every single collection, whether it's a household that has the little 4-gallon bins or our commercial folks who have 65-gallon bins and every single event. We're keeping track of how much waste we're actually diverting away from landfills, and then plugging that into EPA’s [Environmental Protection Agency’s] WARM [Waste Reduction Model] tool to see what our environmental impact is. And [General Manager] Spencer [Sherrill], who is very processes oriented, it's also very important to him that our fleet remains carbon negative, so he'll take that data from our diversion metrics and our compost return and make sure that we do end up staying in the carbon negative territory.”

Photo courtesy of
Compost Nashville

She adds that Sherrill and the operations team prioritize efficiency. “They're always looking at ways to innovate” to improve route density.

Puncochar says Compost Nashville’s commercial customers receive annual diversion reports they can print out and display in their establishments and distribute via their social media channels. “I think that normalizes composting, where it’s just part of the conversation.”

Since its founding, Compost Nashville has collected 12 million pounds of compostables from middle Tennessee residents, businesses and events, Puncochar says.

Muschaweck says the company’s growth has not been fueled by legislation but by locals’ desire to do the right thing. “Most of the time, people are composting simply because they feel like it's the right thing to do. … We've been met very positively by our community. We're really grateful for that.”

Compost Nashville’s biweekly residential subscribers receive 1 cubic foot of compost returned to them for free, while weekly subscribers receive 2 cubic feet of compost that are delivered in bags, with the ability to purchase more.

Through the company’s commercial program, subscribers get to select from a list of 16 local farms and community gardens to receive compost, she says. “One of them is the Nashville Food Project, and they help provide land space for community members to garden who may not be able to have that space on their own. So, by providing that compost to them, we're ensuring that remains really nutrient-dense soil that they're able to access.”

Puncochar says Compost Nashville’s commercial customers “get their green team together, and they pour over this list and go through the biography of each community garden and farm and organization.” He mentions that the Four Seasons even wrote a blog post about the organization it chose and why: a nonprofit that teaches school-age children how to garden. “Some of our clients, they get really into it; it's awesome.”

Challenges & opportunities

Among the challenges companies like Compost Nashville face is the variation in what composting facilities can and cannot accept, Muschaweck says. “Some composting facilities will accept compostables, and some won't. We're very fortunate that our composting facility is industrial size, and so it can reach the temperatures that are required to decompose some of those commercially compostable items.

 “Funding is always a challenge for any burgeoning industry,” she continues. “The more we see the public take interest in composting and recognize that we do need this, … I think that that's going to be a huge opportunity as time goes on.”

Getting compost facilities permitted also is a challenge, Puncochar says. “It is pretty onerous, depending on which state or which county where you're located. It involves a lot of money to have access to land and then for site plans and environmental engineers and things like that.

“It's kind of a hard pill to swallow, to think that if you want to compost a banana or bury a battery, you need similar permitting processes,” he continues. “I find that to be pretty wild that composting is this natural process that, when done right, has very little downstream side effects, and I think that there's an opportunity there for local governments and state governments to make that an easier process and less costly process for more micro composting facilities that pop up. They really should be in every county, in my opinion.”