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 Our Sustainable Journey!

Our Sustainable Journey is a composting service in the suburbs of Chicago. BioBag Associate spoke to Steven Heeley with Our Sustainable Journey about the organization. Their interview is transcribed below.

What led you to start your composting operation?

Heeley: We started on accident. When our daughter was born we were looking into having a garden with less chemicals in it (that was almost 15 years ago) and we got into worm composting. The worms kept growing so we needed more than just the food scraps our family made so we reached out to family and friends and realized this was a niche no one was really involved in… and now we’re here!

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

Heeley: We serve the suburbs of Chicago, mainly DuPage and Will county, residential and commercial customers. They can get in touch by emailing me at Steven@OurSustainableJourney.com or through our website.

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

Heeley: a little more than a ton a week. We just hit 100,000lbs this year, which is super exciting for us!

Please give us 1 fun fact about you or your business.

Heeley: We primarily use composting worms to do the work of breaking down the material we take in, instead of hot composting (which we still do, but then feed the finished compost to the worms). Millions of worms chowing down on food scraps is pretty neat.

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

Heeley: Our focus is on organic/pasture raised stuff. Aside from the composting worms, we have bees, cows, pigs and chickens, all mostly grass fed, free range, and able to roam on as much land as we can give them so they get to live a good life.

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