Following my compost bucket from food scraps to finished product
I wanted to know what happens after my compostable waste gets picked up off my front porch. So I hopped on an electric van to find out.
Following my compost bucket from food scraps to finished product
I wanted to know what happens after my compostable waste gets picked up off my front porch. So I hopped on an electric van to find out.
By Courtney KueppersThis time last year, my slow crawl toward living more sustainably led me to start composting at home. But perhaps to the chagrin of my farming grandparents, I had no plans to do it myself.
Instead, I signed up for WasteNot — a Chicago compost collection company started by North Side native Liam Donnelly when he was just 15. In the early days, he picked up compost buckets around Lincoln Square on his bike. Now, the business comprises a growing fleet of electric vehicles and a customer list of more than 10,000 residences — including mine.
At least a handful of other private companies offer similar services, but unlike places like San Francisco and Seattle, Chicago does not run a citywide composting program. There’s only a small pilot program Mayor Lori Lightfoot launched last fall.
Unlike Donnelly, I did not grow up composting in my parents’ backyard. But the idea of turning waste into something useful appeals to me. Why send my coffee grounds, onion skins, banana peels and newspapers to the landfill when I could compost them locally? For the price of $288 annually, that is.
But a year in, I was still fuzzy on how the stuffed five-gallon bucket I set out on my front porch every other week goes from food scraps to completed compost. With Earth Day approaching, I reached out to WasteNot HQ and they agreed to let me ride along on a daily route.
On Monday morning, I waited with my aqua-colored bucket for the WasteNot van to roll up. Around 9:30 a.m., an electric vehicle clad with a bright logo parked across the street and out hopped Donnelly.
Equipped with a smartphone and orange hand scale, Donnelly climbed my front stairs and got to work. Using the scale, he determined I had packed 15.5 pounds into my bucket this time.
“We weigh every bucket, so that we can provide information to all of our members on how much they are diverting,” he told me.
He’s referring to the dashboard that shows each customer their “environmental impact.” When I checked my account the night before the ride along, I was surprised to see I had composted nearly 650 pounds in my first year of service — a hefty amount of orange peels and pistachio shells, I thought.
WasteNot began when Donnelly, now 26, was working at a cafe as a teenager. The eatery didn’t compost, so Donnelly started taking the coffee grounds home to his parents’ backyard pile. As word spread that Donnelly was helping the cafe, interest in composting grew among other business owners and neighbors.
But, composting setups like the one Donnelly and his brothers grew up tending to require patience, labor and at least some understanding of the science of decomposition: You must balance browns (newspaper, dry leaves) and greens (food scraps, grass clippings) to achieve the right environment for the fungi and bacteria that break down the material. Plus, in the city, there are both space constraints and rodents to consider.
Donnelly knows those factors are all barriers for people, which is what his company aimed to solve by providing a clean and convenient option for urban dwellers who want to compost. He started taking on residential customers in 2015 and says demand has not slowed since.
As I climbed aboard the WasteNot van, I saw what Donnelly meant when he described his pickup duties as an exercise in reverse logistics: The back of the vehicle is lined with stainless-steel shelves that were empty as we took off. Throughout a typical day on a route, those shelves fill up while the stacks of clean lids and fresh buckets dwindle.
Donnelly took me on a mini tour of my neighborhood — zooming around in the quietly whirring electric vehicle and stopping to grab buckets along the way that ranged from 8.8 to 17.2 pounds.
If you’ve given composting much thought, you may associate it with expert gardeners seeking nutrient-rich fertilizer. But that finished, soil-like product is not what motivates Donnelly. In fact, he doesn’t have a green thumb himself — claiming he’s happy if he can keep a basil plant alive. Instead, this whole enterprise is about the climate and, more specifically, keeping methane out of the atmosphere.
When food waste goes to a landfill it retains its mass and releases methane — a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But, according to the University of Illinois Extension, up to 37% of what’s sent to landfills in Cook County could be composted, which would break down food waste and eliminate the release of methane.
Eventually, with ample compostable waste in tow, we headed up Western Avenue to one of the company’s garages on the North Side, where the vehicles are charged and buckets emptied.
Running a zero-emissions business started by necessity when Donnelly was a kid on a bike without a driver’s license, but as WasteNot has grown, the fleet has remained entirely electric.
“If we’re going to do a sustainable service, we’ve got to operate sustainably,” Donnelly said.
At WasteNot home base, the grunt work began with Donnelly dumping the collected buckets into a big blue hopper. Donnelly acknowledged that this is the “least fun part of the day” for most of the team, made up of 25 employees company-wide.
“This one actually smells pretty good. It’s pretty citrusy,” he said, taking a peek into one of the buckets from my neck of the woods.
Part of the process includes scanning for contaminants, like plastic utensils, water bottle caps or aluminum cans that sometimes make their way into buckets. Those get pulled out before the contents head out back, where a big batch of compost-in-process sits inside a black machine known as an “in vessel.”
“Essentially, it’s a very large version of what goes in a backyard, but it’s got some mechanical assistance for us,” he said, adding that there’s no secret sauce to their process. “The most special part about these in-vessel systems is how it moves material.”
The industrial setup allows the company to accept a wider range of materials than what you would typically add to an at-home compost pile, including all food scraps — both cooked and raw — meat, eggshells, baked goods, paper products, pizza boxes, yard waste and more.
After the dirty work of the dumping is complete, the empties are added to a stack of buckets awaiting cleaning. The ones picked up on this route will be sprayed down, sanitized and put back in circulation as soon as the following day.
And my waste that was just added to the giant heap? That will become finished compost within 90 days and sometimes much quicker, depending on the time of year.
After a batch leaves the machine, it still needs to “cure” — the cool-down phase — for two weeks and be sifted three times. In the warehouse, Donnelly grabbed a handful of completed compost stored in a large bin and showed me the consistency in his hand. It’s a dead ringer for dirt — even smelling like dirt, although slightly sweeter, if done right, Donnelly said.
“All of it is on its way to be added to people’s house plants, people’s gardens, community projects,” he said. The company’s customers can opt in to receive finished compost, packaged in a compostable bag, two times a year with their subscription, “ensuring that the nutrients that people are spending money on in the grocery store are actually returned to the soil here in Chicago.”
“I don’t want to say it’s groundbreaking, but it kind of is,” Donnelly said.
A few hours after he picked me up, I bid Donnelly farewell and made my way back home, where a brand new bucket was awaiting me — ready for the process to begin anew.
Courtney Kueppers is a digital producer/reporter at WBEZ. Follow her @cmkueppers.