Top Community Composter Shuts Operations
Blog
This week my Australian composting hero, who by many measures established the most successful community-scaled composting organisation in the country, announced that she is closing her social enterprise, Capital Scraps Composting.
While I was shocked to read Brook’s posts, I was not altogether surprised. I know she looks critically at the big picture and evaluates the likelihood of long-term technical feasibility and financial viability - I believe that her conclusions after many years of working on her model are solid. And from my perspective, it sounds like it was the viability rather than the feasibility that has been elusive and challenging. In her ever-transparent posts on the socials, “market mismatch” is the short explanation for closing the enterprise, with some further hints around delayed uptake by the market, insufficient incentives, and even frustration with the level of information and understanding out there.
I understand this well. Everybody who has gone beyond the family compost systems and turned a pile that is processing their local community’s food scraps has thought about the questions of feasibility (how to make things as easy and manageable as possible), viability (how to raise a sufficient revenue to pay people to do this work), and community engagement (how to share the load so that one person isn’t doing everything). Motivation can be particularly hard to maintain when things get sloppy, heavy and smelly and you’re out there by yourself.
Viability is usually the issue that makes or breaks an infrastructure business model, even when the technical feasibility and the community uptake is working. And for decentralised or small-scale organic waste processing (aka composting, aka carbon and nitrogen capture, aka CO2 and methane avoidance etc. etc.), operational viability recently took a hit when government funding began to focus almost exclusively on kerbside collection of food and garden waste. Just like the community composting efforts in New York City, Australia is seeing the changes and impacts that this has on household awareness and habits. There isn’t anything wrong with councils tackling the organic waste issue through kerbside collection per se, but there are many challenges that come with using only the centralised approach to waste services. Just a few examples:
We’ve seen in many suburbs that the public is not willing to separate their waste to the extent required by industrial processors to produce usable compost;
By reducing the effort required by households, and increasing the dependence on large government contractors, you miss opportunities to capture efficiencies, mobilise community engagement and learning, while you strengthen monopolies, encourage profit-maximisation, and deter innovation in the private sector;
With new infrastructure services and coverage expansion into previously unserved areas, you usually benefit from applying a few different approaches and technologies in the learning phase (as it has been in electrification, traffic, hydrology, internet services and more), rather than using one technical option to try to cover the whole sector.
I recently took a trip to Bengaluru, India and looked into the trend of onsite organic processing that is beginning to emerge in upper/middle-class apartment complexes. They are using a similar method to compost their food scraps and garden waste as most of us community composters elsewhere, combining greens and browns in an airy cage with a minimum volume of one cubic metre, and leaving it to process for around a month, with the help of some well adapted microbes. I learned a few important lessons about reducing the labour required and bringing composting closer to the public’s enjoyment of their gardens. But the question I couldn’t quite answer, as always, was “how is this viable?”. When I shared my experience with Brook, she reminded me that composting alone has never been viable.
Looking at different composting operations, I keep seeing different answers as to why people are doing their community composting, making me think that there are actually different forms of viability. For the waste industry and the commercial composters, there are government service contracts, subsidies, cross-subsidisation mechanisms, waste tipping fees and a little bit of revenue from compost sales; the scale of such operations determines financial viability, as does the level of demand from the public sector, with government phasing out the transfer of organic waste to landfill. For farmers operating onsite composting systems, the labour costs of piling and turning their debris is offset by avoiding the fees to have their green waste removed, as well as reducing the amount of compost and fertiliser that needs to be purchased.
Turning to the residential segments, a block of apartments that pays extra fees for municipal green waste collection, might just find a financial benefit to composting onsite if this eliminates enough collection fees; it depends on how much labour is needed to compost. For a standalone home, the burden of composting is quite tolerable for many, and those who do it usually enjoy it or connect it to their joy of gardening. But when it comes to composting for the community, there can be a heavy burden on a few people who are collecting and turning the compost for many.
This is why we are always looking for systems and steps to make the work as light as possible, as well as testing the “market”, i.e. the waste producers’, (i.e. our friends’ and neighbours’) appetite to contribute in cash or in kind, to make local composting sustainable from an operational perspective. This is very difficult when residential waste producers are able to throw organic waste into their bins, without having an option of paying or not paying for their kerbside collection. The incentive mechanism becomes something of a communication campaign, where we try to explain the benefits of composting locally without the use of fossil fuel transport and CO2-emitting industry, and putting nitrogen and carbon into our depleted local soils, as a hook to encourage the community to take up and support local composting.
But while we as waste producers are slow and hesitant to adapt to cleaner habits, we are basically insatiable when it comes to anything that makes life a little more convenient. It is frustrating to see how ready the world is to demand even greater volumes of plastic for packaging and drinks, when the act of sitting down to drink a coffee or (boba) tea and eat a cruffin from a nice cup and plate with a long lifecycle would reduce the environmental impact (and bring about a healthier attitude to food and drink). It is mind-numbing to watch how blindly we have supported profitable ventures that promised to deliver compostable, recycled or toxin-free products that turned out to be none of these things, with regulators still scrambling to catch up on these ‘new materials’. It is disheartening how often a new data-collecting gadget, app, subscription service or investment scheme is able to raise more capital than the projects conducting the business of environmental restoration or CO2 mitigation. And it’s bewildering how quickly industries that create waste for a living have stamped the words ‘circular economy’ next to their logos, with snappy slogans like “Reuse this plastic bag!” (because it sure ain’t gonna decompose).
When the market doesn’t want to buy the services we’re offering, we’re drawn into cross-subsidising our operations by selling something on the side but, for marketing purposes front and centre, while we do our real work in the background. This is something I’ve observed in the renewable energy sector, where the pioneers in new electricity services have made their operations viable by selling everything from loans, to consulting, to bitcoin, to frozen fish or battery powered torches, rather than kilowatt-hours.
Hopefully we will continue to see experimentation and innovation as we try to catch up with the challenges we have created by throwing the things we thought we didn’t need into deep holes in the ground. We have a lot of ground to cover at every level, from reduction, to reuse, to processing and recycling, and in the same way that we have just started to think about these processes at the household level, we are still learning the very basics when it comes to the carbon cycle and where we as individuals and households are active in that system.
Not to paint a happy ending to all this, but we do see some silver linings in the interconnectedness of many modern-day dilemmas. I like to see my local compost operations as places where we learn practical science, where we meet and befriend our neighbours, and where we get to understand the complexities of infrastructure planning and delivery, while reducing dependency on our cars, producing a good growing medium for better gardens, and staying active outdoors without our phones in hand.
So Brook, if you’re reading this, I pay you my deepest respect, as always. I know there will be things I have misunderstood, as ever, and I can imagine that it’s not always completely fulfilling to work in a sector where there is so much noise and so much money being made by those who aren’t really solving the issues. However, with everything that your piloting of a very solid and pure business model for decentralised composting shows us, it brings us all back to the drawing board to look at where we now stand. I couldn’t not say anything, after all the inspiration, experience and intel you have shared with me and I know your knowledge will be well applied and that your work has never been a waste of time!
Top Community Composter Shuts Operations
Blog
This week my Australian composting hero, who by many measures established the most successful community-scaled composting organisation in the country, announced that she is closing her social enterprise, Capital Scraps Composting.
While I was shocked to read Brook’s posts, I was not altogether surprised. I know she looks critically at the big picture and evaluates the likelihood of long-term technical feasibility and financial viability - I believe that her conclusions after many years of working on her model are solid. And from my perspective, it sounds like it was the viability rather than the feasibility that has been elusive and challenging. In her ever-transparent posts on the socials, “market mismatch” is the short explanation for closing the enterprise, with some further hints around delayed uptake by the market, insufficient incentives, and even frustration with the level of information and understanding out there.
I understand this well. Everybody who has gone beyond the family compost systems and turned a pile that is processing their local community’s food scraps has thought about the questions of feasibility (how to make things as easy and manageable as possible), viability (how to raise a sufficient revenue to pay people to do this work), and community engagement (how to share the load so that one person isn’t doing everything). Motivation can be particularly hard to maintain when things get sloppy, heavy and smelly and you’re out there by yourself.
Viability is usually the issue that makes or breaks an infrastructure business model, even when the technical feasibility and the community uptake is working. And for decentralised or small-scale organic waste processing (aka composting, aka carbon and nitrogen capture, aka CO2 and methane avoidance etc. etc.), operational viability recently took a hit when government funding began to focus almost exclusively on kerbside collection of food and garden waste. Just like the community composting efforts in New York City, Australia is seeing the changes and impacts that this has on household awareness and habits. There isn’t anything wrong with councils tackling the organic waste issue through kerbside collection per se, but there are many challenges that come with using only the centralised approach to waste services. Just a few examples:
We’ve seen in many suburbs that the public is not willing to separate their waste to the extent required by industrial processors to produce usable compost;
By reducing the effort required by households, and increasing the dependence on large government contractors, you miss opportunities to capture efficiencies, mobilise community engagement and learning, while you strengthen monopolies, encourage profit-maximisation, and deter innovation in the private sector;
With new infrastructure services and coverage expansion into previously unserved areas, you usually benefit from applying a few different approaches and technologies in the learning phase (as it has been in electrification, traffic, hydrology, internet services and more), rather than using one technical option to try to cover the whole sector.
I recently took a trip to Bengaluru, India and looked into the trend of onsite organic processing that is beginning to emerge in upper/middle-class apartment complexes. They are using a similar method to compost their food scraps and garden waste as most of us community composters elsewhere, combining greens and browns in an airy cage with a minimum volume of one cubic metre, and leaving it to process for around a month, with the help of some well adapted microbes. I learned a few important lessons about reducing the labour required and bringing composting closer to the public’s enjoyment of their gardens. But the question I couldn’t quite answer, as always, was “how is this viable?”. When I shared my experience with Brook, she reminded me that composting alone has never been viable.
Looking at different composting operations, I keep seeing different answers as to why people are doing their community composting, making me think that there are actually different forms of viability. For the waste industry and the commercial composters, there are government service contracts, subsidies, cross-subsidisation mechanisms, waste tipping fees and a little bit of revenue from compost sales; the scale of such operations determines financial viability, as does the level of demand from the public sector, with government phasing out the transfer of organic waste to landfill. For farmers operating onsite composting systems, the labour costs of piling and turning their debris is offset by avoiding the fees to have their green waste removed, as well as reducing the amount of compost and fertiliser that needs to be purchased.
Turning to the residential segments, a block of apartments that pays extra fees for municipal green waste collection, might just find a financial benefit to composting onsite if this eliminates enough collection fees; it depends on how much labour is needed to compost. For a standalone home, the burden of composting is quite tolerable for many, and those who do it usually enjoy it or connect it to their joy of gardening. But when it comes to composting for the community, there can be a heavy burden on a few people who are collecting and turning the compost for many.
This is why we are always looking for systems and steps to make the work as light as possible, as well as testing the “market”, i.e. the waste producers’, (i.e. our friends’ and neighbours’) appetite to contribute in cash or in kind, to make local composting sustainable from an operational perspective. This is very difficult when residential waste producers are able to throw organic waste into their bins, without having an option of paying or not paying for their kerbside collection. The incentive mechanism becomes something of a communication campaign, where we try to explain the benefits of composting locally without the use of fossil fuel transport and CO2-emitting industry, and putting nitrogen and carbon into our depleted local soils, as a hook to encourage the community to take up and support local composting.
But while we as waste producers are slow and hesitant to adapt to cleaner habits, we are basically insatiable when it comes to anything that makes life a little more convenient. It is frustrating to see how ready the world is to demand even greater volumes of plastic for packaging and drinks, when the act of sitting down to drink a coffee or (boba) tea and eat a cruffin from a nice cup and plate with a long lifecycle would reduce the environmental impact (and bring about a healthier attitude to food and drink). It is mind-numbing to watch how blindly we have supported profitable ventures that promised to deliver compostable, recycled or toxin-free products that turned out to be none of these things, with regulators still scrambling to catch up on these ‘new materials’. It is disheartening how often a new data-collecting gadget, app, subscription service or investment scheme is able to raise more capital than the projects conducting the business of environmental restoration or CO2 mitigation. And it’s bewildering how quickly industries that create waste for a living have stamped the words ‘circular economy’ next to their logos, with snappy slogans like “Reuse this plastic bag!” (because it sure ain’t gonna decompose).
When the market doesn’t want to buy the services we’re offering, we’re drawn into cross-subsidising our operations by selling something on the side but, for marketing purposes front and centre, while we do our real work in the background. This is something I’ve observed in the renewable energy sector, where the pioneers in new electricity services have made their operations viable by selling everything from loans, to consulting, to bitcoin, to frozen fish or battery powered torches, rather than kilowatt-hours.
Hopefully we will continue to see experimentation and innovation as we try to catch up with the challenges we have created by throwing the things we thought we didn’t need into deep holes in the ground. We have a lot of ground to cover at every level, from reduction, to reuse, to processing and recycling, and in the same way that we have just started to think about these processes at the household level, we are still learning the very basics when it comes to the carbon cycle and where we as individuals and households are active in that system.
Not to paint a happy ending to all this, but we do see some silver linings in the interconnectedness of many modern-day dilemmas. I like to see my local compost operations as places where we learn practical science, where we meet and befriend our neighbours, and where we get to understand the complexities of infrastructure planning and delivery, while reducing dependency on our cars, producing a good growing medium for better gardens, and staying active outdoors without our phones in hand.
So Brook, if you’re reading this, I pay you my deepest respect, as always. I know there will be things I have misunderstood, as ever, and I can imagine that it’s not always completely fulfilling to work in a sector where there is so much noise and so much money being made by those who aren’t really solving the issues. However, with everything that your piloting of a very solid and pure business model for decentralised composting shows us, it brings us all back to the drawing board to look at where we now stand. I couldn’t not say anything, after all the inspiration, experience and intel you have shared with me and I know your knowledge will be well applied and that your work has never been a waste of time!
Top Community Composter Shuts Operations
Blog
This week my Australian composting hero, who by many measures established the most successful community-scaled composting organisation in the country, announced that she is closing her social enterprise, Capital Scraps Composting.
While I was shocked to read Brook’s posts, I was not altogether surprised. I know she looks critically at the big picture and evaluates the likelihood of long-term technical feasibility and financial viability - I believe that her conclusions after many years of working on her model are solid. And from my perspective, it sounds like it was the viability rather than the feasibility that has been elusive and challenging. In her ever-transparent posts on the socials, “market mismatch” is the short explanation for closing the enterprise, with some further hints around delayed uptake by the market, insufficient incentives, and even frustration with the level of information and understanding out there.
I understand this well. Everybody who has gone beyond the family compost systems and turned a pile that is processing their local community’s food scraps has thought about the questions of feasibility (how to make things as easy and manageable as possible), viability (how to raise a sufficient revenue to pay people to do this work), and community engagement (how to share the load so that one person isn’t doing everything). Motivation can be particularly hard to maintain when things get sloppy, heavy and smelly and you’re out there by yourself.
Viability is usually the issue that makes or breaks an infrastructure business model, even when the technical feasibility and the community uptake is working. And for decentralised or small-scale organic waste processing (aka composting, aka carbon and nitrogen capture, aka CO2 and methane avoidance etc. etc.), operational viability recently took a hit when government funding began to focus almost exclusively on kerbside collection of food and garden waste. Just like the community composting efforts in New York City, Australia is seeing the changes and impacts that this has on household awareness and habits. There isn’t anything wrong with councils tackling the organic waste issue through kerbside collection per se, but there are many challenges that come with using only the centralised approach to waste services. Just a few examples:
We’ve seen in many suburbs that the public is not willing to separate their waste to the extent required by industrial processors to produce usable compost;
By reducing the effort required by households, and increasing the dependence on large government contractors, you miss opportunities to capture efficiencies, mobilise community engagement and learning, while you strengthen monopolies, encourage profit-maximisation, and deter innovation in the private sector;
With new infrastructure services and coverage expansion into previously unserved areas, you usually benefit from applying a few different approaches and technologies in the learning phase (as it has been in electrification, traffic, hydrology, internet services and more), rather than using one technical option to try to cover the whole sector.
I recently took a trip to Bengaluru, India and looked into the trend of onsite organic processing that is beginning to emerge in upper/middle-class apartment complexes. They are using a similar method to compost their food scraps and garden waste as most of us community composters elsewhere, combining greens and browns in an airy cage with a minimum volume of one cubic metre, and leaving it to process for around a month, with the help of some well adapted microbes. I learned a few important lessons about reducing the labour required and bringing composting closer to the public’s enjoyment of their gardens. But the question I couldn’t quite answer, as always, was “how is this viable?”. When I shared my experience with Brook, she reminded me that composting alone has never been viable.
Looking at different composting operations, I keep seeing different answers as to why people are doing their community composting, making me think that there are actually different forms of viability. For the waste industry and the commercial composters, there are government service contracts, subsidies, cross-subsidisation mechanisms, waste tipping fees and a little bit of revenue from compost sales; the scale of such operations determines financial viability, as does the level of demand from the public sector, with government phasing out the transfer of organic waste to landfill. For farmers operating onsite composting systems, the labour costs of piling and turning their debris is offset by avoiding the fees to have their green waste removed, as well as reducing the amount of compost and fertiliser that needs to be purchased.
Turning to the residential segments, a block of apartments that pays extra fees for municipal green waste collection, might just find a financial benefit to composting onsite if this eliminates enough collection fees; it depends on how much labour is needed to compost. For a standalone home, the burden of composting is quite tolerable for many, and those who do it usually enjoy it or connect it to their joy of gardening. But when it comes to composting for the community, there can be a heavy burden on a few people who are collecting and turning the compost for many.
This is why we are always looking for systems and steps to make the work as light as possible, as well as testing the “market”, i.e. the waste producers’, (i.e. our friends’ and neighbours’) appetite to contribute in cash or in kind, to make local composting sustainable from an operational perspective. This is very difficult when residential waste producers are able to throw organic waste into their bins, without having an option of paying or not paying for their kerbside collection. The incentive mechanism becomes something of a communication campaign, where we try to explain the benefits of composting locally without the use of fossil fuel transport and CO2-emitting industry, and putting nitrogen and carbon into our depleted local soils, as a hook to encourage the community to take up and support local composting.
But while we as waste producers are slow and hesitant to adapt to cleaner habits, we are basically insatiable when it comes to anything that makes life a little more convenient. It is frustrating to see how ready the world is to demand even greater volumes of plastic for packaging and drinks, when the act of sitting down to drink a coffee or (boba) tea and eat a cruffin from a nice cup and plate with a long lifecycle would reduce the environmental impact (and bring about a healthier attitude to food and drink). It is mind-numbing to watch how blindly we have supported profitable ventures that promised to deliver compostable, recycled or toxin-free products that turned out to be none of these things, with regulators still scrambling to catch up on these ‘new materials’. It is disheartening how often a new data-collecting gadget, app, subscription service or investment scheme is able to raise more capital than the projects conducting the business of environmental restoration or CO2 mitigation. And it’s bewildering how quickly industries that create waste for a living have stamped the words ‘circular economy’ next to their logos, with snappy slogans like “Reuse this plastic bag!” (because it sure ain’t gonna decompose).
When the market doesn’t want to buy the services we’re offering, we’re drawn into cross-subsidising our operations by selling something on the side but, for marketing purposes front and centre, while we do our real work in the background. This is something I’ve observed in the renewable energy sector, where the pioneers in new electricity services have made their operations viable by selling everything from loans, to consulting, to bitcoin, to frozen fish or battery powered torches, rather than kilowatt-hours.
Hopefully we will continue to see experimentation and innovation as we try to catch up with the challenges we have created by throwing the things we thought we didn’t need into deep holes in the ground. We have a lot of ground to cover at every level, from reduction, to reuse, to processing and recycling, and in the same way that we have just started to think about these processes at the household level, we are still learning the very basics when it comes to the carbon cycle and where we as individuals and households are active in that system.
Not to paint a happy ending to all this, but we do see some silver linings in the interconnectedness of many modern-day dilemmas. I like to see my local compost operations as places where we learn practical science, where we meet and befriend our neighbours, and where we get to understand the complexities of infrastructure planning and delivery, while reducing dependency on our cars, producing a good growing medium for better gardens, and staying active outdoors without our phones in hand.
So Brook, if you’re reading this, I pay you my deepest respect, as always. I know there will be things I have misunderstood, as ever, and I can imagine that it’s not always completely fulfilling to work in a sector where there is so much noise and so much money being made by those who aren’t really solving the issues. However, with everything that your piloting of a very solid and pure business model for decentralised composting shows us, it brings us all back to the drawing board to look at where we now stand. I couldn’t not say anything, after all the inspiration, experience and intel you have shared with me and I know your knowledge will be well applied and that your work has never been a waste of time!
Top Community Composter Shuts Operations
Top Community Composter Shuts Operations
Top Community Composter Shuts Operations
June 5, 2024
Reduced-Workload Community Composting
Reduced-Workload Community Composting
Reduced-Workload Community Composting
May 6, 2024
Composting and me
Composting and me
Composting and me
January 3, 2024