Lebanon
The 15-month-old company, begun by entrepreneur Jessica Saturley-Hall, picked up households’ food scraps curbside, similar to a trash hauling service, or at drop-off stations at the Hanover Co-op. Upper Valley Compost also had an arrangement for customers to drop off their food scraps at the Concord Food Co-op’s locations in Concord and New London.
But at the same time one composting service option has shut down, another is getting ready to open up.
The Lebanon Solid Waste & Recycling Facility, which has been accepting and composting food scraps in West Lebanon from Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, plans to begin accepting food scraps from the public within the next few months.
The facility has been composting food scraps on-site for 12 years and uses it as topsoil on the landfill, but heretofore has not taken drop-offs from residents.
“We wanted to make sure we got our composting process working well before we open it up,” said Marc Morgan, manager of the city’s waste and recycling facility who has been consulting with Saturley-Hall on the program. “I think we’re in a good place to make that transition.”
“This is another opportunity for waste not going into the landfill,” Morgan said, adding that he hoped the facility would start accepting residents’ food scraps “within the coming months.”
(Vermont’s Universal Recycling Law requires solid waste facilities, such as town transfer stations, to accept food residuals, and beginning in 2020 residents will be required to divert food wastes from their trash steam. New Hampshire currently has no such requirements.)
Saturley-Hall said Upper Valley Compost demonstrated that there is a willingness among people to pay to have their food refuse hauled away for composting, but the cost of the necessary equipment to “scale up” the business nonetheless was too costly to make it viable, and landfill disposal still provided an overwhelmingly cheaper option.
“We had a ton of interest and a great customer base, but the economics of the whole system is tilted very heavily in landfill’s favor,” she said. “Until we have built an infrastructure that helps push down the cost of composting and compost collection, it’s very challenging to compete with landfills.”
“The amount it makes sense to charge people for (the service) doesn’t make sense given the other options available to them,” she said.
Upper Valley Compost offered two plans: One was curbside pickup for $24.99 per month, in which the company picked up a household’s food scraps each week at the curbside left in a 5-gallon bucket that was exchanged for a clean one; the other plan allowed customers to drop off buckets at the Co-op for $12.99 per month.
Saturley-Hall said she had about 250 customers spread around the core towns in the Upper Valley, Concord and New London “with drop-offs being the majority of those,” although she declined to break down the division specifically.
Saturley-Hall was targeting customers like Jennifer Lynn, who said she wants to recycle her household’s food scraps but isn’t big on composting herself in the backyard.
Lynn, of West Lebanon, said she signed up for Upper Valley Compost a year ago “right after I first heard about it.” The service provided the perfect solution because Lynn believes in keeping her household’s food scraps out of the landfill, but “I’m terrible at (composting) and didn’t really care about using it on my garden.”
So Lynn signed up for the lower-cost drop-off option and about every 10 days or so brought her food scraps to the Hanover Co-op in White River Junction, where she’d pick up a clean bucket.
“I thought it was worth investing in, worth paying for,” Lynn said, adding that she especially liked that Upper Valley Compost accepted meat, bones and vegetable oil in their buckets.
That practice was possible because Saturley-Hall brought the food scraps to professional composting operations such as Bob Sandberg’s Cookville Composting in East Corinth, Vt., and the West Lebanon Solid Waste & Recycling Facility.
UV Compost essentially operated as a hauler, much like a traditional trash removal service, and did only a little of the composting itself.
Instead, the company transported the food scraps to other composters in the Upper Valley, paying them a fee to take it and earning any profit in the difference between what UV Compost received from customers and its own cost of operations.
The company had one employee, Saturley-Hall said, in addition to herself. She rented space in Lyme and Lebanon “so we could wash buckets, which is basically what we did.”
Another obstacle Saturley-Hall said she hit was the cost of trucking equipment needed if the business were to take on more than hauling buckets in a trailer attached to a light vehicle. And she said the right watertight equipment for hauling compost was tough to find.
A typical garbage truck costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, but garbage trucks are designed for hauling dry refuse in large volume. In contrast, food scraps are 60 percent water, Saturley-Hall said, requiring special sealing for transport and equipment to load and unload the contents, which can be especially heavy with added weight from the water.
Saturley-Hall made do with a diesel-powered Volkswagen Golf SportWagen on which she hitched a trailer to haul 64-gallon totes; then a Honda Element SUV in which she transported the buckets to composters. Although farmers who compost adapt their own equipment for hauling food scraps and compost, no commercial machinery for the job is really on the market yet, she said.
“The equipment and technology doesn’t really exist yet. I talked with dozens of equipment manufacturers and it turns out you need different equipment to handle compost,” she said.
“In order to have it economically viable to run a truck, you have to have a lot of customers, a dense route and collect a lot of material. And with compost, which is heavy and wet but not a lot of volume, it would take a ton of customers to fill up a truck,” she said.
Lynn, the Upper Valley Compost customer, said she will miss having a service to handle her food scraps to keep them out of the landfill, but she knows what to do.
“I’ll go back to putting it in the backyard,” she said. “Somebody is going to figure out how to make it work, and I’ll sign up again.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
