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Food

‘I turn garbage into food’

By Jane Black,November 27, 2012

Jeremy Brosowsky founded Compost Cab as a way to collect compostable material… (JUANA ARIAS/FOR THE WASHINGTON…)

Jeremy Brosowsky never pictured himself in the garbage business. A serial entrepreneur, he is 39, with an Ivy League degree and a stint at Goldman Sachs on his résumé. But when he turned his attention to sustainable agriculture, he realized that what Washington needed most wasn’t another urban farm. It was compost — rich, organic matter to enrich city soils — for the city farms already out there.

Trash, even “good” trash like compost, is not usually appetizing enough to make it into the pages of the Food section. But this column’s mission is to highlight businesses that fill the gaps in the sustainable-food chain. Composting is one of them: Americans generate 250 million tons of garbage every year. Nearly a third of what is sent to the landfill could be composted but instead sits in an airless hole where it decomposes and releases methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas.

“I don’t think of it as the garbage business,” Brosowsky said. “I’m in the magic business. As I tell my kids, ‘I turn garbage into food.’ ”

Brosowsky remembers the date when he had his eureka moment about composting. On March 21, 2010, he was in Milwaukee at Growing Power, one of the country’s most successful urban farms, where he hoped to learn enough to start his own rooftop garden in Washington. On a compost run — a trip to a bakery, a cafe and several other locations to pick up food scraps — he realized just how inefficient it was for the farmer to drive from place to place, often waiting an hour or more between pickups. Suddenly, he had an idea: Farms need materials to produce compost. And people need stuff picked up. Putting those together is natural. On the spot, Brosowsky sat down and wrote up the outline of his business plan. Using Growing Power’s shaky WiFi connection, he registered the domain name CompostCab.com.

For $32 a month, Compost Cab gives each customer a countertop collection basket and an airtight bin, lined with a sturdy, compostable bag, to minimize smells and keep away rodents, always a worry with composting. Customers fill the bin with kitchen scraps such as banana peels, coffee grounds or vegetable trimmings. If it grows, it goes, is the company rule.

Each week, Compost Cab picks up the bag, leaving behind a clean bin with a new liner. It delivers the waste to urban farms, including Eco City Farms in Edmonston (near Hyattsville) and the Washington Youth Garden at the National Arboretum, which use the material to improve their soil and grow more food. It also works with commercial clients including the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill and Qualia Coffee in Northwest Washington.

“As composting becomes more mainstream, my job is to make sure that some significant piece of the stream gets captured for urban farms,” Brosowsky says.

For Kate Hill, a caterer and self-described “foodie,” subscribing to Compost Cab was a no-brainer. She had been giving her scraps to a neighbor with a compost pile, but that ended quickly when rodents became a problem. “It killed me to see how much I was returning to the trash,” she said. “There was no reason that it shouldn’t go someplace that it can do some good, rather than sitting in a landfill in a plastic bag.”

The company has converted city residents who otherwise might not have considered composting, including Doug Rand, a policy adviser at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He doesn’t garden, and he doesn’t have a back yard. He wanted to compost but he wasn’t interested in collecting trash and driving it each week to a dropoff: “Until Compost Cab arrived, there was no way to do it unless you were a zealot.” If it weren’t so easy, he wouldn’t do it, he said.

To date, with no marketing save a few postings on local listservs, Compost Cab has recruited 350 residential customers. Seventy-five percent of customers continue to subscribe after one year. Each week, Compost Cab delivers about two tons of compostable material to local farms. Next month, the company will begin to offer service in Baltimore. Brosowsky says he hopes to add six more cities, possibly including Brooklyn, Chicago and Charlottesville, in 2013.

Brosowsky admits that residential compost pickup is only a short-term business. In the long run, it makes sense for cities and towns to pick up organic waste along with garbage and recycling as they do in San Francisco, where city trucks collect 600 tons of compostable material each day. Washington’s Sustainable DC task force, which aims to make the city the “greenest” in the nation, is discussing options for composting, though no formal plans have been announced. In the meantime, Brosowsky is working to prove to municipalities that composting makes sense.