Vol. XV No. 2
March / April 2021
Serving Soil, Mulch, Compost & Wood Pellet Producers www.SoilandMulchProducerNews.com
NEWS
Rust Belt Riders, Turning Food Waste Into Quality Soil Blends
T
he farm-to-table social movement – which promotes serving locally grown food at restaurants and other eateries – is being reverse engineered into a table-to-farm effort that offers benefits to businesses, government and especially the environment. Among the companies across America flipping the farm-to-table concept is Rust Belt Riders, headquartered in Cleveland., Ohio. It collects food scraps from businesses, restaurants and homes and apartments, composts the material and then turns it into a fertile organic soil that can be used to grow food. “The idea that we should know where our food is coming from has been gaining prominence,” says Daniel Brown, co-founder of Rust Belt Riders. “And we were asking why people weren’t concerned with where their food would end up going.” So Rust Belt Riders decided to see if people would be willing to pay a small fee “to have the peace of mind and comfort of knowing their food scraps could be diverted from going to landfills and instead it goes back to some of the farms that are growing the food they would then be consuming. “We set about to devise a service that would work with businesses and individuals to provide them with an alternative to the over 40 percent of food that ends up going to landfills,” he explained. Rust Belt Riders, started in 2014, today serves some 200 businesses as well as about 1,800 households utilizing its food scrap residential pickup service or publicly accessible drop-off locations, primarily in Cuyahoga County. An estimated 60 percent to 70 percent of the food waste c o l l e c t e d c o m e s f ro m businesses, which include restaurants, nursing homes,
By P.J. Heller health care facilities, universities and grocery stores. The company diverted some 2.4 million pounds of food scraps from landfills in 2020 and is on target to double that amount this year, Brown predicts. Part of that increase is expected to come from bringing on a regional grocery store chain, as well as restaurants reopening as coronavirus pandemic lockdowns and stay-athome orders are eased or lifted. “The pandemic for us was sort of a call to arms for us to figure out how to make our residential service more broadly available,” Brown says. “A lot of people hadn’t made a homecooked meal in years prior to the pandemic. Now that their favorite restaurants are closed or have limited hours, people are cooking at home for the first time in a while. “When you’re doing that, it’s really difficult to ignore the amount of food waste that occurs through the preparing of meals. When you eat at a restaurant, you don’t have to interact with the food scraps because somebody else cooked for you. When you go to the corporate cafeteria and
get your lunch, you don’t have to think about food waste because you eat all the food that’s on your tray, but that might not be the case for what went into making the meal.” The food scrap pickup service started about nine months ago and has some 400 households signed up. The older drop off service, which covers a larger area, is used by about 1,400 households. “We’re just grateful we’re part of a community that values and sees the benefits of a service like this,” Brown says. The company in 2019 was named the small-scale composter of the year by the US Composting Council. Food scraps collected by Rust Belt Riders are transported to the company’s EPA licensed compost facility in nearby Independence, just south of Cleveland. The 1.5-acre compost facility follows the National Organic Program guidelines from the U.S. Agriculture Department, Brown notes. On average, it takes from three to four months from the time food scraps come into the compost facility until it ships out as bagged Tilth Soil organic products ready for the garden. “We knew early on given the size of our facility that doing mass production of cubic yards of compost wasn’t the game we were trying Continued on page 3