A bike-powered startup sees green potential in kitchen scraps

David Valder mounts a fat-tired bicycle in the predawn chill of Charlotte’s Wilmore neighborhood and, pulling a small blue trailer, sets off into the future of banana peels and day-old bread.

Valder, 23, is co-owner of a bike-powered startup company that collects household kitchen scraps, mining the mountain of food waste that Charlotte throws away.

“Sometimes we want to say, ‘Hey, you should eat that,’ ” Valder said of the weekly 6:30 a.m. rounds the partners share.

Recycling of glass, aluminum and paper is routine across the city, feeding markets established over decades. Now entrepreneurs are eyeing a new frontier: Food that can be turned into soil-nourishing compost.

Commercial businesses and homes alone produce at least 175,000 tons of food waste a year, says a 2012 report for Mecklenburg County. Three-fourths of it is dumped in landfills, which release the planet-warming gas methane.

That report sparked an idea that Kris Steele, 30, fanned for two years before launching Crown Town Compost with two partners in July.

Crown Town sees profit potential in a volume of food waste that, in a year’s time, could fill the Bank of America tower uptown.

The partners joined a growing movement to recycle the nutrients and energy potential in food scraps. The Environmental Protection Agency set a national goal in September of cutting food waste in half by 2030.

Mecklenburg County is part of local initiatives that have persuaded the Carolina Panthers, Central Piedmont Community College and 22 local schools to recycle their food waste.

“Food waste diversion is the one area that so many communities have neglected,” said Laurette Hall, the county’s waste reduction manager.

Keeping food out of landfills fits with local government and corporate sustainability goals, Hall said. But businesses are taking the lead.

Blue Sphere Corp. is building a power plant in north Charlotte that will be fueled by organic wastes, which produce “biogas” as they decompose. It’s expected to start operating later this year.

Two other local companies, Wallace Farm in Huntersville and Earth Farms Organics in Gaston County, have turned leftovers from Charlotte restaurants and grocers into compost for years.

Crown Town is alone in serving homes, which locally compost less than 5 percent of their scraps, and doing it by bike. Bike power is most in keeping with the company’s green ethos, the partners say.

The business first focused on the Wilmore neighborhood, collecting four-gallon buckets from doorsteps, but plans to expand into Plaza-Midwood in December.

The partners quickly learned to map their bike route downhill, not up, and have ordered an electric-assist device to help pull scrap loads weighing 30 to 50 pounds.

The rewards, they say, include tangible results that can be elusive in other green sectors.

“Every bucket seems small, but we look at the numbers every month and we’re doing about 2,000 pounds,” Valder said. “And that’s something.”

Do well, do good

Steele and partners Valder, 23, and Marcus Carson, 25, all have day jobs, Steele in mortgage finance and his partners in sustainability roles with Belk and Mecklenburg County.

They’re part of a new breed who hope to do well by doing good. After pitching their idea at Queen City Forward, a nonprofit that boosts social entrepreneurs, Crown Town won a $2,000 grant. They bought a bike trailer.

“This community is ripe for this,” Steele said. “They want change, they want their dollars to go to good things. And people want to get their hands dirty.”

Residential customers – fewer than 20 at this point without aggressively soliciting business – pay $10 a month for the pickups.

Some supporters have volunteered to ride the morning bike routes. The number of households bringing their scraps to Atherton Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, where Crown Town collects food waste, has doubled in recent weeks.

Wilmore resident Nathan Gray has two young children and a busy work life as an information technology manager. He also shares the neighborhood vibe of craft beer, backyard gardens and living lightly.

But Gray doesn’t trust himself to properly maintain a compost pile, so he’s a Crown Town customer. He’d like some of the finished product back – a goal the company is working toward.

“It’s got to offer more than just make you feel good,” Gray said. “To put that compost back in your own backyard sort of completes the loop.”

Restaurants sign on

Crown Town has a half-dozen commercial customers from whom they collect waste on weekends in a green 1963 Ford pickup.

One of them, Pure Pizza owner Juli Ghazi, loathes the thought of food buried in landfills. Without oxygen to decompose organic material, she says, it might as well be Styrofoam.

Ghazi’s two restaurants recycle or compost everything they produce. Takeout is wrapped in aluminum foil instead of pizza boxes. Used grease becomes biodiesel fuel in Asheville. And food scraps are turned into the compost that fill two garden beds outside her Central Avenue location.

“There is a base of clients who love what we’re doing. Some don’t know or care,” she said. “But I know spiritually that I’m serving them a better pizza in a better way.”

Charlotte restauranteur Tom Sasser remembers the effort it took to haul bottles to recycling centers when he started business in 1987. His Harper’s Restaurant Group’s kitchens now have color-coded waste buckets to send to Earth Farms Organics in Dallas.

But that too takes commitment, Sasser said. Finding space to store food waste, and keeping it free of flies, is a special challenge for restaurants with little space.

“We all ought to to do it, and it’s the right thing, but it’s hard and it’s expensive,” Sasser said.

Crown Town also sends its waste to Earth Farms Organics. For decades, owner Jim Lanier ran a business that mucked out restaurant grease traps and spread the material to fertilize farm fields.

Lanier began composting eight years ago and found promise in a product that nourishes soil without chemicals. “We started realizing this is our future,” he said.

Earth Farms processes 100 tons of food waste a day from businesses as far-flung as Dole Foods to the Carolina Panthers. The compost, sold mostly in bulk, goes to organic growers, landscapers, turf farms, athletic fields and, more recently, homeowners.

“Once they try mine,” Lanier said, “they’re a customer.”

This story was originally published November 25, 2015 at 1:00 AM with the headline "A bike-powered startup sees green potential in kitchen scraps."