Posted on 08/17/2011 10:50:20 AM PDT by flowerplough
Utah compost company aims to make the most out of America's vast supply of leftovers.
In a Salt Lake City warehouse, tall mounds of rotten vegetables, coffee grounds, and sawdust are steaming at 160 degrees Fahrenheit. It's not a desert dump yard, just the facilities of EcoScraps, an innovative organic compost company started by three Brigham Young University classmates who dropped out of school to launch their business. With 2011 revenues expected to approach $1.5 million, their risk seems to be paying off.
EcoScraps' compost mix, sold by the bag in Utah, Arizona, and Colorado stores, is free of the chemical additives, bone meal, or animal manure often found in other soil mixes. (Garbage and pesticides can also be found in compost from less scrupulous companies.) Instead, EcoScraps gets its key ingredients—fruits and vegetables—from local grocery stores and food banks, which can reduce disposal costs 20 percent by dropping off expired produce at the company's yard. There, the food is chopped up, mixed with wood shavings and coffee grounds from Starbucks stores, and allowed to decompose until a proper balance of nutrients is achieved.
"Everyone involved is getting some sort of benefit out of it," says CEO Dan Blake, 24.
Blake hit on his business concept at an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet, when he realized how much leftover food was headed for landfills. Nearly 40 percent of available food in the United States is ultimately thrown out, and...
(Excerpt) Read more at worldmag.com ...
We’ve been composting since we bought the farm in January. Next years we will use a mizture of compost, peat moss and chicken manure to fertilize our 3/4 acre vegetable garden.
I hope to be canning veggies throughout September 2012.
What were they thinking, dropping out of school like that? Do they think Jobs and Woz and Gates just dropped out of school and started multi-billion dollar companies?
Wait.... There seems to be a logic fault somewhere...
/johnny
This guy IS using garbage (discarded food). Not that there's anything wrong with that.
A more efficient way to deal with food scraps is to feed them to pigs, which are then fed to us.
We have been composting for the past 25 yrs.; and putting it on our manageable sized garden to build up the soil. It’s amazing how many peelings and other scraps we put in the compost bins; and we eat lots of leftovers.
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