Welcome to BioBag’s Community Heroes series! Each month, we will highlight community heroes that are making a difference in their communities and working to make their local environments cleaner and healthier.

This month, we are taking a look at Big River Organics!

Big River Organics was founded by Sue Krause, who plays many roles in her small town. She picks up and compost food waste from many different places in their town, including their small rural school. She also teaches the kids from Lancaster, Wisconsin about compost and worm farming.

She loves her dog Newt, who plays at the Cassville dog park where they use BioBag pet waste bags at the dog park. She composts the waste from the park, which they return to flower beds around the dog park. 

What led you to start your composting operation?

Krause:  As a little kid, I was always a little shadow with my grandparents in the garden. Composting was simply part of the magical growing process. One of my treasured Christmas presents as a young gardener was Rodale’s Guide to Composting.

Think of the many sacrifices invested in our food: crops planted, harvested, trucked, stocked and sold.  Calves are born, fattened, slaughtered. A tremendous amount of energy is put into this food. Sadly, nearly half of this food investment is thrown away. I compost the vast energy remaining in this food. I harvest the untapped food potential to create new products. In this way, the food is respected and I can honor the work that has been put into it.

Who do you serve, and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?

Krause:  I live in a small town, less than 800 people. I’m on the village board, work with the food pantry garden and waitress at the Cassville Café. Folks know how to find me. Potential customers reach out to me on Facebook (Big River Organics) or stop me on the street. Kids cheer when I drive by in my old topless Jeep: Go Worms! 

How much organic material do you typically take in on a weekly basis?

Krause: I estimate that I compost approximately 1,000 pounds a month of food waste. Some of my sources include the grocery store, the food pantry, Café, local tavern, campground and several residential customers.   

Please give us one fun fact about you or your business.

Krause:  I am a red wiggler (worm) farmer. Thousands of my wiggly livestock break down my finished compost further into valuable vermicast. Plants love this valuable soil amendment! I sell it in 50 pound pails. I also use it to make seed bombs which are compost morsels packed with wildflower seeds. Folks buy them from me and plant to spread beautiful flowers.

If you would like to be featured in a future edition of Community Heroes, please email us at marketing@biobagusa.com.

Welcome to BioBag’s Community Heroes series! Each month, we will highlight community heroes that are making a difference in their communities and working to make their local environments cleaner and healthier.

This month, we are taking a look at Duluth Compost!

Duluth Compost was founded by Nathan Bronk, Duluth, MN in 2021.  Growing up Nathan was taught to reduce waste and be mindful of my impact, and those lessons have stuck with him. When he saw a way to fill a gap to help the Duluth community and the environment, creating Duluth Compost was a perfect fit! 

What led you to start your composting operation?

Bronk:  Growing up I was taught to reduce waste and be mindful of my impact, and those lessons have stuck with me. When I saw a way to fill a gap to help the Duluth community and the environment it was a perfect fit!

Who do you serve, and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?

Bronk:  Duluth Compost serves Duluth, Minnesota and the easiest way to get started is to visit www.duluthcompost.com

How much organic material do you typically take in on a weekly basis?

Bronk:  So far this year our biggest pickup day was 500 pounds. It’s exciting to see this number and our impact grow!

Please give us one fun fact about you or your business.

Bronk:  One fun fact about Duluth Compost is that we partnered with a local farm this summer, processing food scraps into compost there for use on their fields. Community connections are the best and it is great to be a part of keeping food local.

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If you would like to be featured in a future edition of Community Heroes, please email us at marketing@biobagusa.com.

Welcome to BioBag’s Community Heroes series! Each month, we will highlight community heroes that are making a difference in their communities and working to make their local environments cleaner and healthier.

This month, we are taking a look at SoDak Compost!

SoDak Compost was founded by Deirdre Appel after moving to Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 2021. She is a community gardener, works part-time at Cherry Rock Farms, and is a member of the Sioux Falls Co-Op and Dakota Rural Action. She received her Master of Global Policy Studies from the LBJ School at University of Texas at Austin in 2016. We spoke to her to learn a little more about her organization. 

What led you to start your composting operation?

Appel: Upon moving to Sioux Falls, South Dakota from Brooklyn, New York, I realized there was no way to continue recycling food scraps as I had been doing in New York City. Without access to a backyard, I was left with little options. After speaking with community members and seeing that there was a real demand for composting in Sioux Falls, despite its lack of existence, I decided I would start my own nonprofit and became the first community composting nonprofit in the state of South Dakota. Thanks to our amazing partners at IronFox Farms which host our compost bin system, we were able to collect our first banana peel in June 2022. 

We offer a weekly drop off service where participants can swap their full bucket for a new clean, BioBag-lined bucket for the upcoming week. We also are active in the community and host workshops, lead classes, and offer volunteer opportunities for anyone looking to learn how to compost.

Who do you serve, and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?

Appel: We currently serve 40 households and a few small businesses. Those looking to start composting with us can visit www.sodakcompost.org/take-action or follow us on Instagram for more updates. 

How much organic material do you typically take in on a weekly basis?

Appel: Though it has varied with the seasons (including pumpkins!) we average about 800 pounds of food scraps a week. Since starting in June 2022, we have collected 10,000 pounds of organic material. We are starting small but thinking big.

Please give us one fun fact about you or your business.

Appel: SoDak Compost is the only nonprofit organization working on community composting in South Dakota. We hope we are the start of a new trend throughout the entire state. 

Anything else you’d like to share?

Appel: In December 2022, we both presented at the Sioux Falls Big River Sustainability Conference and composted the entire event. We made sure that no food scrap ended up in the landfill and swapped plastic utensils and plates for compostable products from VegWare. 

As we head into 2023, we are seeking new sites to expand to and working with Community Gardens and other partners to create our second location.

In January 2022, we participated in the Emerging Composter Competition at the U.S Composting Council Conference in Austin, Texas. Although we did not win, we left energized and inspired to put our ideas into action. Four months later, we officially launched our operations and collected our first food scraps. 

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If you would like to be featured in a future edition of Community Heroes, please email us at marketing@biobagusa.com.

Welcome to BioBag’s Community Heroes series! Each month, we will highlight community heroes that are making a difference in their communities and working to make their local environments cleaner and healthier.

This month, we are taking a look at The Compost Company!

Founded by Edward Wansing, The Compost Company is the only facility in middle Tennessee accepting food waste, which they recycle (along with other compostable materials) into organic composts, soil blends, and mulches. We spoke to Emily Ezell to find out more about her organization.

What led you to start your composting operation?

Ezell: At the time, there was a complete lack of infrastructure to provide food waste and compostable materials collection and recycling services in middle Tennessee.  Given that food has become one of the largest components of what goes into landfills, we were convinced that there was an enormous opportunity to have a meaningful positive impact on our community and environment.

Who do you serve, and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?

Ezell: We serve commercial facilities of all descriptions: restaurants, offices, hotels, hospitals, food manufacturers, caterers, and event spaces.  If someone would like to explore how a program might work at their place of business, they can call 615-866-8152 or email jeffrey@compostcompany.com.

How much organic material do you typically take in on a weekly basis?

Ezell: We currently average around 160 tons per week.

Please give us one fun fact about you or your business.

Ezell: We have gotten in the habit of naming our trucks.  Our dump truck is Haulk Hogan (it has “Haulkamania” painted on the back), and our food waste collection truck is Macho Man Randy Salvage.

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If you would like to be featured in a future edition of Community Heroes, please email us at marketing@biobagusa.com.

Welcome to BioBag’s Community Heroes series! Each month, we will highlight community heroes that are making a difference in their communities and working to make their local environments cleaner and healthier.

This month, we are taking a look at Dirt Wain!

Brett Bloom started Dirt Wain in 2019, bringing composting to communities around Fort Wayne, Indiana. Serving households, neighborhood organizations, and businesses of various sizes, Dirt Wain is dedicated to community-scale composting and contributing to the unique place that is Fort Wayne. We spoke to Brett to find out more about his business.

What led you to start your composting operation?

Bloom: There is a lot of redevelopment and economic investment in Fort Wayne. The city has turned itself around from Rust Belt to whatever it is becoming. Indiana has an abysmal record of low wages and high pollution, and we hope to impact this by insisting on a cleaner place to live as our prospects are elevated. Composting is one big component of this.

Who do you serve, and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?

Bloom: We compost food scraps, yard waste, and pet waste. Our subscribers are households, apartment complexes, churches, schools, commercial kitchens, large factories, coffee shops, grocery stores and more. [More information about the various subscription plans can be found here.]

How much organic material do you typically take in on a weekly basis?

Bloom: 5-6 tons. [A chart of total materials composted per month can be viewed here.]

Please give us one fun fact about you or your business.

Bloom: Fort Wayne is where we operate from. Dirt Wain is the business name. It sounds like Fort Wayne, except a wain is an old English term for an open farm wagon. It has not been in regular use since the late 17th century.

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If you would like to be featured in a future edition of Community Heroes, please email us at marketing@biobagusa.com.

Welcome to BioBag’s Community Heroes series! Each month, we will highlight community heroes that are making a difference in their communities and working to make their local environments cleaner and healthier.

This month, we are taking a look at Green Heron Compost!

Green Heron Compost Service is a curbside compost service in Knoxville, Tennessee that launched in 2019. They are committed to protecting and restoring the environment by diverting organic food and plant waste away from landfills and instead, delivering compost to local farms to replenish their soils. We spoke to owner Kat McDearis about her organization, which you can learn more about in the interview below.

What led you to start your composting operation?

McDearis: I started Green Heron Compost because I was living in a small apartment in downtown Knoxville and tried to start composting. After some research, I realized that there wasn’t any sort of composting option in Knoxville at that time. Since my wife is a soil scientist, I decided I would use her expertise to try and start a small composting operation. After almost a year of prep and testing, I launched Green Heron Compost Services using my small sedan until I got enough customers to afford a pickup truck. Luckily, business took off from there!

Who do you serve, and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?

McDearis: We serve Knox County residents and businesses by providing curbside food waste collection services. From there, the waste is processed at our farm facility where it becomes high-quality compost. If someone would like to start composting with us, they can visit our website www.greenheroncompost.com and sign up by registering their address.

How much organic material do you typically take in on a weekly basis?

McDearis: We are currently diverting about 1-2 tons of organic waste per week, and that number continues to grow each month.

Please give us one fun fact about you or your business.

McDearis: Green Heron Compost got its name because the owner is an avid birdwatcher especially with Grandma Elma. The company name is a tribute to one of their favorite wild waterfowl.

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If you would like to be featured in a future edition of Community Heroes, please email us at marketing@biobagusa.com.

Welcome to BioBag’s Community Heroes series! Each month, we will highlight community heroes that are making a difference in their communities and working to make their local environments cleaner and healthier.

This month, we are taking a look at the Enviro Pet Waste Network!

The Enviro Pet Waste Network (EPWN) connects people and communities that are successfully diverting pet waste from landfills with those who want to learn how to develop similar programs in their own cities and towns. One program within the Network, EnviroWagg, is highlighted in the video above and composts dog waste from dog daycares, hiking trails, and dog parks in the Denver Metro area. We spoke to EnviroWagg’s manager Rose Seemann about EPWN, which you can learn more about in the interview below.

What led you to start your composting operation?

Seemann: Dogs and cats in the United States produce around 180 million tons of waste per year. That amounts to 159 football fields 10 feet deep! Each year! (See infographic). That’s 12% of the national residential waste stream that could be returned to the soil or transformed to energy, but it’s overlooked by policy-makers. EPWN brings together people sustainably managing pet waste with others heading in that direction.

Who do you serve, and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?

Seemann: EPWN serves people worldwide with resources that can help them keep pet poop in the loop. To learn more about do-it-yourself pet waste composting and advocacy for community composting, visit https://epwn.org.

What are the environmental benefits of pet waste composting?

Seemann: Around half of pet waste goes to landfills with comingled plastic. There it emits methane – a potent greenhouse gas – while slowly decomposing. In the US, landfills account for more than 17% of all methane emissions. Abandoned dog waste can also do serious damage to waterways, hiking trails, beaches and parks. Diverting pet waste is one piece of a huge eco puzzle that needs to be addressed if we want to achieve zero waste. 

Feel free to add any additional information about your operation as you see fit.

Seemann: EPWN kicked off in 2021 and we already have starter groups in the US and Australia.

Anything special going on that you would like for us to share?

Seemann: For more information on EPWN, please click here.

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If you would like to be featured in a future edition of Community Heroes, please email us at marketing@biobagusa.com.

Welcome to BioBag’s Community Heroes series! Each month, we will highlight community heroes that are making a difference in their communities and working to make their local environments cleaner and healthier.

This month, we are taking a look at Go Green OC!

Go Green OC, Inc is a grassroots organization dedicated to promoting the goals of zero waste by education, program implementation, and cross-community collaboration. Focused on the eastern shore of Maryland, they strive to make Ocean City become the first zero-waste resort town in the United States. We spoke to founder Josh Chamberlain about his organization, which you can learn more about in the interview below.

What led you to start your composting operation?

Chamberlain: Go Green OC was started to find alternative ways to waste incineration by creating a sustainable circular economy.

Who do you serve, and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?

Chamberlain: We serve the Worcester County, Maryland area, specifically Ocean City, Maryland.  People can reach out to us via Instagram or our website. We reach 30k people monthly on Instagram and 99% of our volunteers come from social media.

How much organic material do you typically take in on a weekly basis?

Chamberlain: At the peak of our season, we are ingesting around 10,000 pounds of food waste. The program runs from April to November (seasonal town).

2018 – 1900 pounds

2019 – did fundraising

2020 – 12,190 pounds

2021 – 80,000+ pounds

2022 – on track for around 200,000 pounds

We could see a total accumulation of around 300k pounds.

Please give us one fun fact about you or your business.

Chamberlain: This compost program is run by a restaurant owner and film producer with hardly any waste experience. This program is driven by 99% volunteers.

Feel free to add any additional information about your operation as you see fit.

Chamberlain: We have 12 locations participating with us today, with over 30 on a waitlist.  We are up from 1 volunteer to nearly 8.  We started the first pizza box collection receptacle for composting in Ocean City.  We also converted the largest motorcycle rally on the east coast to zero waste (OC Bikefest) by introducing recycling – and this year…COMPOSTING!

Anything special going on that you would like for us to share?

Chamberlain: We are doing a HUGE zero waste event in Ocean City, MD. It’s called Bikefest. Our volunteers assist with recycling and composting efforts. It’s the largest Motorcycle Rally on the east coast.  This year, we are introducing composting to the event. For more information about the event, click here.

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If you would like to be featured in a future edition of Community Heroes, please email us at marketing@biobagusa.com.

Welcome to BioBag’s Community Heroes series! Each month, we will highlight community heroes that are making a difference in their communities and working to make their local environments cleaner and healthier.

This month, we are taking a look at Greener Bay Compost!

Founded one year ago, in July 2021, Greener Bay Compost is the only curbside compost pickup service in the Green Bay, Wisconsin metropolitan area. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources reported in 2021 that approximately half of what ends up in landfills could have been compostable, so Greener Bay Compost aims to divert that waste from the landfills and upcycle it into something infinitely more useful. We spoke to founder Cory Groshek about his organization, which you can learn more about in the interview below.

What led you to start your composting operation?

Groshek: Several years ago, I started by setting up a five-bin (pen) composting system in the backyard of my quarter-acre property in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with my wife, because we hate wasting food, or seeing it go to waste, and we also wanted to save money on raised bed soil at our local home improvement stores by making our own compost.

Before long, we were successfully composting not only our own food waste and household organics, but a lot of plain cardboard, clean wood ashes, coffee grounds, and egg shells we were picking up from a few local businesses as well. Soon thereafter, I came across the Instagram account of another composter named Sarah in New York State. She was running a company called Clearwater Creek Compost, where she was doing five gallon bucket swaps for customers who wanted her to do their composting for them as a service, and I thought to myself, “People would actually pay for this?” Needless to say, I was intrigued.

Long story short, Sarah inspired me to turn my backyard composting operation into my own Curbside Compost Pickup Service, which I named Greener Bay Compost.

Before I launched my business, though, I put out some “feelers” to my neighbors on Nextdoor in early July 2021, to get a sense for whether this kind of service would be something my local community would be interested in. And lo and behold, it was! I received over 30 very positive responses. Accordingly, I went ahead and purchased everything I needed to get started (buckets, lids, BioBags, stickers, etc.) and set up GBCompost.com.

Exactly one month after I’d put out the aforementioned “feelers,” we were dropping off buckets to our first sixteen subscribers, and a week later, swapping out full buckets in exchange for clean, new ones. Everything happened so fast, and we are now up to 127 subscribers, which is almost 800% growth in just over nine months!

Who do you serve, and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?

Groshek: We currently serve residential customers in all of Green Bay, plus the surrounding communities of Allouez, Ashwaubenon, Bellevue, De Pere, Hobart, Howard, Ledgeview, and Suamico. So we serve, essentially, everywhere within 15 miles of Lambeau Field (where the Green Bay Packers play). For more information on us and our services, everyone can visit GBCompost.com, or contact us at www.GBCompost.com/Contact.

How much organic material do you typically take in on a weekly basis?

Groshek: As of late, we’ve been bringing in between 600 and 900 pounds of would-be organic waste from our subscribers each week, or roughly about one to one-and-a-half tons each month. This number, of course, is growing each month, as we take on more and more subscribers.

Please give us one fun fact about you or your business.

Groshek: We run an Annual Pumpkin Drive each year, after Halloween and through Thanksgiving, through which we collect large volumes of pumpkins, gourds, straw bales, corn stalks, etc. that would probably end up in the trash if it weren’t for us 🎃

Feel free to add any additional information about your operation as you see fit.

Groshek: We currently offer Every-Other-Week Compost Pickup Service (GBCompost.com/Services) to residential subscribers in the Green Bay metropolitan area only, but are considering expanding into serving select businesses, as well as into the Appleton/Fox Valley area of Wisconsin, which is only about 30-45 minutes from our home base. Also, we have been featured in our local news several times already (three times on television, once in a local lifestyle magazine, and, most recently, in Green Bay’s official newspaper, the Press Times), as everyone can see at www.GBCompost.com/Category/News.

Anything special going on that you would like for us to share?

Groshek: We just acquired a nearly-seven-acre property that we call The Farm in the Town of Lessor (Shawano County, Wisconsin), to help us expand and grow our business, and we are very excited about all the possibilities this presents for us. Additionally, we were recently name-dropped (in April 2022) before the Green Bay Common Council, by the Green Bay Sustainability Commission, as a potential partner for the City of Green Bay, as it works toward establishing a City-wide Food Waste Prevention Pilot Program by the year 2023. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to potentially expand our services into deeper into Green Bay with the City’s help!

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If you would like to be featured in a future edition of Community Heroes, please email us at marketing@biobagusa.com.

Welcome to BioBag’s Community Heroes series! Each month, we will highlight community heroes that are making a difference in their communities and working to make their local environments cleaner and healthier.

This month, we are taking a look at The Urban Canopy!

Founded in 2011, The Urban Canopy works to create a more sustainable, nutritious, and equitable food system in Chicago, from production to distribution to waste. The four pillars of their mission are Nutrition (making healthy produce accessible and available year round), Environment (reducing food waste, food miles, and encouraging sustainable farming practices), Economy (creating local, self-sustaining, meaningful jobs), and Community (empowering our communities to build towards a healthier food system). We spoke to Bonnie Shultz at Urban Canopy about the organization, which you can learn more about in the interview below.

What led you to start your composting operation?

Shultz: What is now our Compost Club started as one part of our plan for a circular and cyclical company and economy when we started our rooftop farm. Our aim from the beginning was addressing current systems as a whole. No one piece of the overall food system is broken – they are all dysfunctional in their own ways – and similarly no one part of the solution can function independently of the others.

We started small by composting the excess plant material from the farm, and shortly after collecting pulp from a juice bar we sold wheatgrass to. A handful of our founder’s friends and other businesses signed on and the first year we launched Compost Club we had just over a dozen members. Our membership now clocks in at just over 3500 homes and businesses.  

Who do you serve, and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?

Shultz: We serve much of the Chicagoland area! People can get in touch by visiting our website.

How much organic material do you typically take in on a weekly basis?

Shultz: We averaged 50,943 lbs a week in 2021.

Please give us one fun fact about you or your business.

Shultz: Our first compost collection buckets were landfill bound Jimmy John’s pickle buckets! One of our founders would drive around to Jimmy John’s locations and ask if they had any empties because he saw all the ways our food systems and the foodservice industry are wasteful. Though inorganic waste diversion isn’t our field of expertise, the Urban Canopy’s values center around these sorts of larger picture whole-system reform ideals. 

Feel free to add any additional information about your operation as you see fit.

Shultz: We do much more than composting! We have 2 farm operations (indoor and outdoor setups), a CSA program, a processing kitchen that turns would-be wasted produce into shelf-stable consumables, and a distribution branch that aims to save bulk quick-sale produce from the landfill.

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If you would like to be featured in a future edition of Community Heroes, please email us at marketing@biobagusa.com.