1:06
Hey podcast listeners. And thanks for turning back in to today's show of eco-friendly homes. And in our eco-friendly home today, we are talking about composting and I am a huge fan of composting and our guest speaker here today. Alexa Rosenstein. Also a huge fan of composting as she is the director of operations for scraps and scraps is a really, well-known very official composting service in our mile, high city of Denver and the surrounding areas. So nice to meet you, Alexa, and thanks for being on the show today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about composting and, and just share some, some tips and tricks for. Yeah. So is a scraps, the like official composting service. Like our governments and surrounding cities, because I know that cities will pick it up themselves, but y'all are like associated with, with so many different cities in our surrounding area. Yeah. So if you are a resident in Denver and you live in a single family home, or a condo slash apartment building with seven units or fewer. You can actually take advantage of the municipal program. So the city government of Denver provides a compost collection service for residents. Scraps is not affiliated with that program. And we actually came about as a result of the shortcomings of that program and not to diss the city's efforts or anything like that, but the limitation that they have. Seven units or fewer pretty obviously excludes a lot of apartment buildings. We live in a city, of course. So there's hundreds of apartment buildings that are much larger than seven units. And that's really when we decided that we needed to come in and do what we can to kind of serve those people who did not have access to the city's program. On top of that, the safe program is not. You're not able to participate if you are a business of any kind. So that is offices, restaurants, cafes, all sorts of businesses. So that was really our, our impetus for, for getting started to service residents and businesses all across the city. Nice. Yeah. You're so right. That that's like a huge gap, a seven or less, because, I mean, I don't think I've ever lived in an apartment. Or a house that has qualified for the government's program yet. And so that's, and I, you know, I I'm in real estate, so I help clients buy a variety of houses. I have a friend who bought a condo. I just helped a buyer buy an, a townhouse, but I don't know what the town I think is, does qualify because I think he has five in his row, but then it's like a larger complex and there's five in the other, but they do have the composting. Like waste bins in the back alley that the government would come and pick or the city would come and pick up. But scraps is, has really been amazing for us so far. I know you and I were emailing a little bit back and forth when I started with scraps and I was nervous about y'all's Ben type, because. I had only worked or use composting in my apartment once before with a different service who doesn't service in Jefferson county. And they were great too, but it had like a, a different lid. So I was a little bit nervous about that, but I actually just keep it outside on our patio and we use smaller. Composting baggies instead of like, like a three gallon bag we use just like small ones. And then, so I put maybe like six of them in there every week. So it gets pretty full. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's really great. I actually didn't know that much about composting before I moved to Denver and started working for scraps. And now I've been here three and a half years or something around there and now I feel. Somewhat of an expert when it comes to collection, at least. And I have one of our bins at my house. It's interesting because different, you know, tips and practices work for different types of people. But the one that you mentioned is really common where instead of having one bag in the bin, because Scott's only comes once per week for our residential members you can do multiple bags, tie them off. Not cold outside in the winter. It's really great to, to put the bin out on your patio where it just freezes and it's, you know, good to go. There's no smell. There's no moisture in the summer to kind of replicate that same scenario. We always recommend people try to keep your bin or maybe your smaller bags in the freezer. That really helps. Like I said, keep things contained, no smell, no mask. So there's a handful of little things that can really help you get from week to week. And some people really, their compost doesn't smell at all. So it kinda just depends on what you're eating, what you're throwing in there. Moisture content, all sorts of stuff like that. But that's our goal to just make it pretty simple. And aside from moving your scraps from what you would be throwing in the trash into a separate bin, we handle the collection. We handle all the messy stuff. You just set out your bin, we empty it and that's it. Yeah. Usually come to my house and pick up pretty early. I see the guy in his truck with all the other composting bags, and I wanted to ask him before if he would pick up our Christmas tree too, but I missed him cause he's so quick and early, we do and do Christmas trees. This is the first year that we. Tried to put it out there. We tried to get our larger apartments so that we could get more trees in one pickup. But it's something that we're exploring Christmas trees, yard waste. We do like pumpkins around Halloween and stuff like that. So that is an expanding area of the business. Simplified note, I actually did not carve a pumpkin this year. We have a vertical tower garden and my boyfriend and I, we grew pumpkin's on the tower garden. And so we actually they're like a Japanese type of pumpkin. They're really small. They're like a sweet pumpkin. They're really tasty. You can eat the skin. So I did not carve and waste a pumpkin. I actually ate my Halloween pumpkin and it's, it was really awesome. Yeah, but for people, you, you brought up a good point. Like you didn't, you weren't super familiar with composting before you moved to Denver. And I sort of have this luxury where I've known what composting is since I did this program in the island school, or that's what it was called, the island school. It was in Eleuthera in The Bahamas. If anyone's out there listening and you're in high school, definitely check out the island school and The Bahamas because it is well worth going to, and so I went for six weeks. And they have semester long programs, but I did the summer program and they taught us so much about like local ecology and eating local. I also got my first introduction towards like veganism there because they showed us the movie food, Inc. Yup. That'll do it. Yeah, that will do it. Which I'm not, I'm not vegetarian or vegan anymore. I did give it a good shot for a little while though. But that we also learned about composting. And so after every meal we would go over and we would scrape all of our food remains into the compost, really large trash plays, and they showed us the whole cycle of it too. Like this is what more composted or more de. Decomposed food looks like. And then it eventually turns into soil. And I know a lot of people like to use it for their house plants for their home gardens. I have very few amount of house plants, so they don't get any of my compost. But so, yeah, like there's so much to unpack here for people who do not know what composting is the first off, like, what is compost. Yes. Fantastic question. The way that I like to describe it, that I think is easiest to conceptualize is in the same way that we recycle our aluminum cans and glass bottles and cardboard. And we turn those into more paper, glass and aluminum. We can actually recycle our organic waste and turn it into compost. So like you said, instead of sending our food scraps to the landfill, which maybe we can get into a little bit more composting them actually essentially gives them another life and turns them into this new product that is really beneficial. How plants gardens agriculture on a large scale. And it has myriad benefits. It helps our soils retain moisture which especially in Colorado is important because we have wild flowers and it's wild flowers, wild fires Wildfires and just drought. It's super dry climate. So composting is organics recycling. You can take anything that was once alive. That's, you know, fruit and vegetable peelings. Maybe a health plant that didn't quite make it even trimming from your lawn, grass, clippings, or twigs. Same as with animal products. Has a little bit of a caveat because you can't as easily compost animal products. If you compost at home with say a backyard tumbler or something like that. But if you utilize an industrial composting facility, which is what scraps provides we can accept all of those animal products. And again, maybe that's something we can dive into more in a little bit, but taking all of those scraps, all of those uneaten peels and. And bones getting that through the composting process turns into finished compost, and then we can use it, apply it on our soils, et cetera. And like I said, give it kind of a new life. You actually said the brand's name in that sentence. I don't know if you caught that visa taking the scraps. Yeah, it was it very seamlessly, not as well. So, yeah, there's some really cool things. A few, a few directions we could go in here and first off, so you said the industrial composting. So the scraps is actually the first composting program I've ever used. And Denver has many to choose from many, you know, go compost, no matter what, like do not ignore it just because you prefer one brand over the other, just get. Compost service pickup, but scraps has actually been really amazing because y'all allow like meat products and dairy products where and I guess that's where the industrial composting comes in because you can take more of those, those animal products. And I did, I think I also asked you in our email, do y'all allow dog poop and the answer was no, but chicken bones like dairy products and that's con that's really uncommon. Yeah, it is. I think that thankfully it is becoming more common as municipalities like Denver and just small businesses, like scraps start to pop up around the country. I think organic waste is becoming a more on the forefront of people's minds. A little side note here, 40 to 50% of what we Americans send to the landfill in our trash is compostable waste. It's food waste primarily and then like paper products. So 40% of what we're sending to the landfill has the potential to not be sent to the landfill and to be composted instead the Northeast. Physically running out of space for landfill. So this is really kind of top of mind for them outside of, you know, that problem. It's also the right thing to do for various reasons. So yeah, I would say that businesses like us are popping up and utilizing industrial facilities is really. My perspective, the future, especially if this is going to scale this is not to say that if you're composting in your backyard, absolutely keep that up. It's fantastic. Especially if you are maybe an avid gardener or you just, you know, have a lot going on in your backyard and and you have trimmings. Clippings often, it's great to have your own pile that you can kind of, you know, brew yourself essentially. And then you have a finished product that you can use. However, like you mentioned, if you are, you know, a meat eater, animal products, Eggshells can be tough to break down in your home pile. Same with citrus, all that stuff. Or if you're someone like me who doesn't necessarily want to spend time in the backyard, turning my food, waste into piles and doing all that work that's where, you know, a service like ours comes in. So. Industrial facilities. We actually, the compost that we pick up at scraps is taken to a local facility called organics. They're super well-known in the composting industry. They're kind of the original and I think maybe the largest industrial facility on the Rocky mountain region. And what makes them industrial? I actually don't know too, too much about the science, but I have been to their facility taken tours and we work relatively closely with their team. They are just processing compost on a scale that is almost hard to imagine they have. Dozens and dozens of rows of compost that are a hundred, 200 yards long, you know, six or seven feet high, just full of composts. And they have of course machinery that can process that. And they are able to, because they're so closely monitoring. Essentially the status of these tiles. And because, you know, everyone who works there is, is much more intelligent than I am when it comes to the science of how composting works and although microorganisms at work they. Are able to I guess what's the right word to get those piles up to a high enough temperature for a certain amount of time. That is really, really difficult to do in your backyard on a small scale. So it's really temperature timeframe. I know that are two really important factors when it comes to industrial composting. Those things allow for the breakdown of things like meat and bones. Industrially compostable like plastic products, if anyone has ever come across, you know, a utensil or a cup that's compostable like a plant-based composting utensil or like dog poop bags. Since I mentioned that earlier. Yeah. Yeah. Those things are not going to break down in your backyard, but they will break down in this industrial setting. So I did not realize that you and I were going to be getting into the science about composting today. I just didn't think that we would get here, but I'm really glad that we are because you brought up some really good points that like the difference. Really between industrial composting and backyard composting, or like even community garden, composting is the technology and the science that they're able to use to speed up the composting process. And so I don't know how long, like backyard composting or community garden composting generally takes, but you also said, you know, if you leave your bin outside during the winter, that's fine. It will freeze them all. How many smell, or you can put it in the freezer. So it kind of goes like that, that whole picture of sort of painted right now, you know, like you're not going to be able to compost as well in your backyard in Colorado, because it's going to freeze for what five months out of the year. And then, and then, and then just the industrial composting, having that technology to, like I, assuming they're also like compressing the food together to kind of generate more heat, like internally and like maybe also have heat radiating onto it. But I have seen composting. At home, like machines that you can put on your countertops. And so you don't have to have like a compost collection service. You can just put all your food, waste your food scraps into this at home composting machine. And it takes like about a week to turn it into nutrient rich soil that you can then use in your garden or your house plants. So I think that's super interesting. It is interesting. And this is, I, I feel like I know. About some of this and some of it is still like amazing and a bit confusing to me. So one thing is so composting itself, as we mentioned is like organics recycling. You're turning your scraps into this finished soil amendment. The process of. Of scraps turning into here. I am plugging scrap again on inadvertently. Great. Thank you. Thank you for scraps for being here on the podcast today, I'll keep reminding everyone. So the, the process of turning your food. Into compost is it is all a due to the microbial activity that goes down. So there are certain bacteria and organisms that facilitate the decomposition of our food waste and turn it into food scraps. So essentially by ingesting the nutrients and stuff from our food waste. Like excretions are what compost is. And that sounds maybe a little bit gross, but these things are just absolutely microscopic tiny, tiny organisms. And compost itself is full of life. There is if you take a teaspoon or a tablespoon of finished compost, meaning that everything has been broken down and we have the final product in that teaspoon of compost, there are. More organisms than there are human beings on the planet. So there is so, so much activity going on in a compost pile. And you actually can compost in extremely cold temperatures. There are some methods to doing this. You have to, it also depends on your climate, et cetera, but keeping the pile covered is one thing to do. And also turning it is really important. Again, this is not necessarily what we at scrap do because we are a hauler. But if you compost at home or if you're curious about what goes on at the facility What goes on inside of a compost pile. That is it. So if you have your scrap bucket out for pickup, like you said, you leave it on your patio and it's, you know, it's February here. So it's going to freeze overnight. Those are not going to anything in there is not going to start breaking down because we haven't given it a chance. To essentially let those organisms come to life and start decomposing that stuff. When you put those food scraps into a compost pile, there are organisms at play. So you need that, that life, those bacteria, those organisms, you need air. So that's why compost tumblers. You have to turn them, or if you have a static pile on the ground, you have to turn it physically with. Pitchfork you have to have air in the pile so that those organisms can, can breathe essentially. And then you have to have moisture. So those are kind of the three requirements for our compost pile. If you're not turning your compost, essentially, if you're letting it sit out on your patio if there's no moisture and if those organisms can't survive, then that's, nothing's going to happen. So at the industrial facility, they actually kind of the opposite of what you mentioned instead of kind of compressing the food waste to, to generate heat. It's the opposite. We want to infuse air into it because maybe not, not to get too granular, but this is really important when it comes to the distinction between landfill, a landfill environment and a composting environment. I love the granular things. I I'd love that stuff. Very small details that like, No one ever blogs about, but I love that. Cool. Okay. So what's important here is, like I mentioned, these, these microbes, certain bacteria and microbes exist in what's called an anaerobic environment. That means there's no air, no oxygen present versus an aerobic environment. Where there is. That aerobic environment is corresponds to composting. As I mentioned, we have to turn the piles. We have to make sure that they're getting air and that they're moist enough so that these organisms can thrive in a landfill. This is actually, I think one of the most fascinating things that I first learned when I delve into the world of composting there's actually a fantastic documentary. It's called wastes. It used to be on Netflix. I hope it's still is super awesome. It's all about food waste and it goes into complex thing a little bit, highly recommended. Anyhow in that documentary. I heard this statistic that just absolutely blew my mind. I was just like, that cannot be true. So the fact was, if you take a head of lettuce, you put that head of lettuce in a landfill, and then you take, you know, a similar head of lettuce, put it in a compost pile. The head of lettuce that went to the landfill will not break down for 25 or more years. It will take that long and it might not even fully break down at that point, that head of lettuce in a compost pile will break down in a matter of weeks. And when it's finished, we will have this beautiful finished compost product. So in a landfill, as I mentioned earlier, we have an anaerobic environment. There's no air. So there, the bacteria that exists in a compost pile do not also exist in a landfill. They're basically completely different. And without those bacteria, things do not break down. So landfills, when we send our food waste there, when we send anything there, it's essentially intuned, which sounds a little bit weird, but nothing is decomposing because the life of these microbial organisms that are required to do the decomposing, they can't exist there. That's a little bit of, I guess, an overview of, of one of the main differences between composting and landfilling. But we need air, we need water and we need those organisms to do their work in breaking down our food waste and, and creating composts as essentially a very wonderful by-product of their digestion for lack of a better term. So the history of why we started creating landfill. Oh my gosh, pardon me? I was about to say, I wish I did. And then I realized, I wish I'm kind of glad I don't, because I'm sure it's the history that, you know, why. You so many fossil fuels and why their plastics industry is as big as it is. I don't know the answer. That's a little bit of a cynical response, but the listeners will understand I don't know the history of a landfill either, unfortunately, but I also wish that I did just, I should've looked it up before this episode because that would be very. It just seems like during the industrial era, when sort of all of our modern systems came into to be like people were living in a very simple lifestyle, like people definitely grew their own food and like, maybe while they did throw it away in some way, shape or form, like I said, you know, neither of us know the history of this, I'm just kind of guessing here. But like, there's definitely people who grew their own food and like through their own. Like scraps into their yard and probably definitely knew how to compost and like how to turn old food scratch. I, I'm just curious like how that large disconnect became and you know, I'm wondering maybe people just didn't know the serious Repercussions that would have come from putting everything into a landfill because I'm 27. And so when you tell me that ahead of lettuce has been in a landfill in tomb for as long as I've been alive, my parents could have ordered lettuce from there, sort of picked up lettuce from the grocery store, like the day before my birth. And then they like got, had a baby and then like a week later, the lettuce was bad. It could have gone that could literally have had. Yes. I think about this a lot where I'm like, oh my gosh, I'll have random flashbacks of plastic products that I've used or just, you know, growing up. I'm like that Ziploc bag that I used to bring to school every day with a sandwich in it. All of my Ziploc baggies are sitting in a landfill and they will outlive me by like hundreds and hundreds of years. Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's really. Interesting and sad that we have come from. Like I don't, I remember learning about world war two era. People had victory gardens where they, you know, grew their food. And, and I think that we used to have, and of course, you know, indigenous people way before Americans came to colonizers, came to America. There's we used to have such a. A more intimate relationship with our food and how it gets to us, the growth process, cultivating it, harvesting it, and just having much more of a connection to it. And now you know, in some ways, certainly for better, but also in a lot of ways, for worse, we, the convenience of going to a grocery store and buying things pre-packaged and all that stuff is we there's a distance between. Us and, and how we get that food. And like, we're not supposed to have, you know, avocados year round here in Denver. We're not supposed to have, you know, fish here that are nowhere caught in our, you know, streams and lakes in Colorado, all sorts of examples like that. And so I think that, like you said, I think there's totally been. At distancing, a separation between us and the food that we eat. And I think that that has also contributed to this concept of throwing things away. And how away is this, you know, far away place in our mind, because. Passing by a landfill every day and seeing what we're contributing to. We just throw it in the bin. Someone picks it up and it's off of our minds. So a lot of contributing factors to, to how we've gotten to where we are now. Well, if y'all ever, just, since you were saying with the landfill is like a way and out of your mind and you know, the same thing sort of happens with my compost. Like I put my compost out, it's gone. I don't know where it goes. So if scraps, every wants to do. A tour of a one organics for, for people in the Denver community. I would absolutely join. I would absolutely bring some people along. Maybe we can email about that later. But I would love to see where my composting goes and like, see what the Awan organics, industrial composting factory turns that into, because I know like for the municipal composting that gets turned into. Eco cycle, right? Go grow eco grub. Okay. Eco cycle is a different program within the municipality, but he go grow. So yeah, our, our municipal compost eco grow. And I would just love to have more eyes on that process, especially because of. I recycle. And I know that that can kind of be a broken chain and like it has broken in the past, which is why people are sort of skeptical of it now. And different cities, like same with composting allow different things like some do take clamshell containers. Some do not take same with chicken bones. And real quick, just, just for you and the listeners, since we were talking about like food in the grocery store, like the avocados and things like that. I have a previous episode with Elizabeth bolus, the ingredient insider, and she is wicked smart and she gets really, really into all of that with the grocery store. But my trash, so my boyfriend and I, we compost. And we recycle, and then we have our regular trash of just, I don't even know what's in there really, except for like bags that things come in and like just things that you just can't recycle pretty much. Cause we, we throw everything in the compost now. But I don't have trash anymore. I basically don't have trash. Like they could actually come and I really want to like see what we can do to make this actually happen. Especially for people who have composting in there, like seven or less homes, people don't need weekly trash pickup and bi-weekly recycling pickup. We actually need weekly recycling pickup, weekly compost pickup, and bi-weekly trash pickup because my trash came on Tuesday and granted, we were out of town this week, but our trash comes every Tuesday and our compost comes every Wednesday. I didn't have any trash. I literally put the trash bin out and I opened it. I was like, did they come already? I just put the trash bin now, did they come? What happened? We just didn't have any trash to speak. Cause we were out of town this weekend. I looked down in there to see what there was. There was like a few bags of dog poop. I know I've talked about dog poop a lot on this episode. I think it's kind of relevant. He's a little dog, so they're tiny bags, but I had like two bags of those in there. Cause I didn't want to put them inside the house one day and then I had. An Amazon. Like terrible bag. And I was like, oh my God. And then I looked at my compost bin and I had, you know, four of my tiny bags of compost. It has drastically reduced the amount of trash that we put out every week. There's maybe one or two bags of trash that definitely. Maybe to like, I don't even know if we have friends over or something, you know, but even, so we actually had friends over for friends giving we hosted 22 people in our house. Okay. That was a lot. I know, like everyone can think of like 22 people that you know, but to have everyone in your living room is like a lot. And after everyone got finished eating. My friend, Bella and I, we made sure that all the food scraps went into the composting bins and we just piled it out there. So I don't know if everyone was super busy after Thanksgiving, but it has drastically reduced the amount of trash that we have just from putting our food scraps in a different bin. Yeah. Yeah, there was, I mentioned this earlier on a bigger scale kind of nationwide. The average city or the average residents and 40% of what they send to the landfill is organic waste of food scraps, et cetera. There was actually a. A study done in our city of Denver couple of years ago. And they found that 50% of what residents throw in their trash in Denver can be composted. So I noticed the same thing that you just described when I started composting there. Don't take out my kitchen, trash bins for, and it's, you know, a standard sized trash bin. I probably take out one bag every, maybe three weeks. And like you said, it's just, and it's mostly packaging from food, which I tried to avoid, but in some cases I can't, and it's mostly plastic. While I'm on that note, I might take a moment to plug a new program that just came to Denver called red. They are awesome. They are a hard to recycle. Pickup service. So essentially in the same way that scraps works with your compost, you just set out a bin and we empty it. Red whale does the same thing. You get a bin, you fill it with plastic film, which is by far the most the category that I take advantage of the most, they also take batteries and light bulbs old clothing that you can't donate, or maybe if you don't feel like donating it. And then they have like rotating categories. So highly recommend. Really really useful service. And even through using that composting plus Bridwell taking a lot of my plastic film. I'm taking out the trash even less. So it's such a good feeling. And it's, it's really nice to see that you're, you're physically, you can see how much you are diverting from the landfill, which is just to me, helps me sleep at night. But to your point about. Our, our city services. You are, I have talked to probably like a dozen people at this point with who are frustrated by the fact that our recycling only comes every other week and our trash comes every week. And I don't even roll my trash bin to the. Maybe like once every six to eight weeks, it's just, I have a, I rent and I have a really, really big one and I will never ever fill it up. And so all that to say it kind of seems like the incentives are reversed in a way. For our city for, for waste aversion, which is, you know, recycling and composting. There is an initiative in, I think it's up to city government at this point it's been kind of in the works across the state for a while, but it's called a pay as you throw. And that is, yeah, it's, it's really cool. It's a program for, I think the initiative is just for the city and county of Denver, but the idea. That every household gets a recycling bin and a composting bin, because right now, if you don't ask for the city's programs or obviously if you don't subscribe to a company like scrap you don't get it and you have to pay extra it's about $10 a month for the city's program. A little bit more for the scraps program. And with this pay, as you throw, every household would get recycling and composting for free, and then you would pay for your trash depending on the size of your trash bin, the smaller, the trash bin, the lower fee that you pay each month. So kind of putting the incentives in place to encourage people. Hey, you should think about recycling and composting first and getting a smaller trash bin if you can saving a little money. So that's, I think that's a pretty interesting initiative and could be pretty helpful. Yeah, I like that. I do wonder if they could like change the trash bin instead of like doing a size of the trash bin, because then I imagine they're going to have to create more smaller trash bins. Like what would people do with all these large bins? They can add like a weight measuring system onto like the. Trash pickup call or something like that. Just the thought. So. As far as the landfills go and like greenhouse gases, because composting is super relevant for combating methane in the atmosphere. And they'll talk about that a lot on your website, which I definitely appreciate. So on your website, just on the homepage, more than 1.5 million pounds of organic waste have been kept out of the landfills since 2017. And how does, and then it says this helps protect our climate preventing tons of greenhouse gases, mainly methane from being emitted. And there's been over a million pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent. How am I trying to say this? Yeah. Taken out of the environment. Yeah, because of composting with scraps, just scrap. Just scrapped. Yeah. So imagine, you know, everyone's composting efforts and the statistics behind that. It's huge. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really wild. And I was actually trying to look into this yesterday. I got pretty deep into this like scientific report about methane emissions from landfills. And it was slightly over my head, even though I did learn a few things. So I don't know. Exactly how to quantify essentially the, the, the amount of methane that our food waste contributes. But I do know a couple of things about landfills and methane and all that stuff. So listen, If you were to essentially aggregate all the landfills in America and kind of label it as like its own state landfills would be the third largest emitter of methane of any industry, any place Obviously a huge, huge problem methane itself when compared to CO2 carbon dioxide is 20 to 50 times more potent as a greenhouse gas when released into our atmosphere. So it's 20 to 50 times better at capturing and retaining heat. So it's way more problematic. Landfills, like I mentioned earlier, when we were talking about aerobic versus anaerobic in that anaerobic landfill environment, the breakdown that does happen, which is on a smaller scale when it does happen, it emits methane. That's the by-product instead of, kind of the by-product we talked about in composting, which is the compost itself, the by-product of decomposition in a landfill is methane. So. A lot of landfills. This is so scary to me, but a lot of landfills are just constantly, constantly emitting methane, and they actually hype that methane out. And a lot of landfills just have a burning pipe of methane that runs 24 hours a day, just burning a flame of methane into the atmosphere. Horrifying. It's not really fair. It's not really fair to like all the people who make videos about going vegan that are saying, you know, in cows, I just, because cows are relevant in the vegan videos. That's the only reason I talk about this. But like, you know, we're talking about how, how animals, cows, Bart, and they put out methane into the atmosphere, but more practical. Thing that we all already do. We don't even have to like make a dietary change to reduce the amount of methane that's in the atmosphere, because that's really a, a big thing for a lot of people, you know, dietary changes. Like some people are already on restricted diets and cannot make that change, for example. Or like, then you're having to say, okay, all the restaurants have to make the change. The industries have to make the change. Whereas if we just get everyone composting, that's reduced. 40 to 50% of, of the things that are in the landfill and, and correct me if I'm wrong, but does the food, so you were saying how the microbiomes in the composting turn into this really rich nutrient is it soy. I'm just byproduct it's I think the best way to refer to compost finished compost is a soil amendment. So it's, you wouldn't plant your plants directly in it and you use it to infuse nutrients in your soil. So it's amending your soil. Okay. So it creates this amendment of soil. That's really, life-giving very nutrient rich, amazing, beautiful. I let you call it beautiful earlier, a beautiful product versus like lettuce, not decomposing. And so it's actually just releasing methane. And then if the lettuce does decompose, because it's in the landfill with like batteries and tampons, it's not a nutrient rich system, either it is or diapers or whatever. It's like full of full of these other chemicals and like toxic leaks. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Compost. Yeah. We're not, when we send things to the landfill, we don't, we're not attempting at any point to get them back in any way. There is some, some efforts to capture the methane that is released from landfills, and I've kind of seen this kind of pop up more and more. And it's, it's interesting because I don't think that that is the future. It's certainly. We do not need to be sending more to the landfill to be able to get more methane. That's like so perverse in my mind. But you know, if we can capture the methane, that's already being admitted, I guess. Why not? That's cool. But like you said, to divert that waste is ultimately just apples and oranges. Like you, there's no comparison in my mind of the two diverting them creating compost and, and the various applications of compost. Beneficial. Whereas sending things to landfill is in no way beneficial. So the, the use of compost as well, the composting process when our food waste is being decomposed and digested by these microorganisms. That whole process itself. There are very, very, very few emissions from just like the digestion. And the emissions that do occur are multiple times offset by the benefits that come from compost. This is actually one of the things I read about in that article. I read yesterday. Which I already knew, but I kind of got a little bit more of like scientific backing when I was reading that. But applying compost, as I mentioned earlier is obviously the benefit is if you've ever applied it to your, to your garden or to your house plants, it is a fertilizer itself because it is so nutrient rich in a lot of cases, applying compost re means that you do not have to apply any sort of artificial. Fertilizers at all. And there's growing movement around what's called regenerative agriculture, which is essentially a collection of practices to help us better manage our lands and move away from harmful practices like killing but also using pesticides and herbicides that. In our plants in our water, et cetera. So compost over time is even on huge, huge acres of land, you know, industrial agriculture settings can eventually with these other regenerative practices, take the place of needing to use pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers and all that stuff. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a really, really important point. Another plug that I will put in here for another documentary, but I also could not recommend more. It's called kiss the ground. It's on Netflix. It was another one that just blew my mind. Absolutely. My jaw was just for like two hours afterwards. I was like, I can't even believe how amazing this was. So definitely go watch, kiss the ground. The, the, the benefits of regenerative, agriculture and composting, which is a key component of regenerative agriculture. Our judges. W are almost in comprehensible. If we were to manage our, our lands in this way, using compost, allowing our soil to infiltrate more water and absorb and hold more water fighting droughts. It's. A holistic way of managing lands. You mentioned earlier cows and methane emissions from like burping and farting. That is a big problem. And part of the reason that's a big problem is because of the way that we manage our cattle. The week have them in what's called concentrated. Cappo something. I forget the meaning of, someone's probably like cringing hearing this. I think it's concentrated animal feed operations, and that's if you've ever been driving or if you've seen these vegan videos, any videos where you see animals in these packed Watts just with no green space that is such a concentration of. Of emissions, methane, et cetera. There is a way to it's called managed grazing. You can integrate animals and nature coexist before humans came in and disrupted things. And, you know, we thought that we had a better idea by separating the. If you combine animals and land management there, it's a beautiful synergy that happens. And any who I won't get into it, cause that's not my area of expertise, but watch the video. Yeah. We have to watch the video to know what it is that you're leaving us on the cliff for what happens there. Well, Alexa, I know where we're at. We're like past our original designated time. So I just want to ask you one more question before I let you go. And thank you for staying a little bit over my, a little bit where, what are scraps goals for the future? So like is your goal to have composting and everyone, a compost bin and like all the apartments downtown, or like, what are y'all's goals? Yes, I think right now our net is cast pretty wide when it comes to our goals. We have because the city of Denver has the municipal program that we've referenced a couple of times. We're hoping that that program expands just for the city sake and for humanity sake. But until that happens, we definitely are focused on upping our numbers, both residential and commercial in the city of Denver. And then over the past two years, we've really been trying to focus on the kind of surrounding suburbs of Denver too who don't have access to any sort of municipal service. So we have. Increased our service area for our pickup residential service to Lakewood wheat Ridge, Broomfield, Arvada. We're kind of moving more in the west Western direction. Westminster, I live in Queensland, I'm in wheat Ridge. So I totally appreciate that. Y'all have done that because when I moved out here, I lost my ability to comp. And then I had previously been doing so. Thank you. Thank you. So yeah, we, we want to get as many people composting as possible. We are being. Approach. We actually just kind of a little bit of a backstory. We started off scrap downtown Denver was kind of our headquarters and we started as a bike based company. So we used to do all of our collections on bikes and electronic trikes. We loved that and we actually held onto those for over three years, maybe four years. And. Only recently outgrew those and decided that we had to become vehicle based because we were just handling so much volume. And so a little bit bittersweet, but now we actually recently just purchased our first commercial CDL truck. So just picture like your standard trash truck. We have one of those now for compost, which is just something that I don't think either and no one on our team really ever envisioned happening. So. We are definitely growing. We're always looking for momentum. We're always looking for new areas to bring our service. So if anyone listening is interested in composting, feel free to look us up. Scrap smile, high.com. Reach out to me. My email should be on the website. But yeah. Tell your friends about composting. We have drop-off programs as well. So if you don't happen to live in our service area, or if you'd rather just be able to drop off your compost any time, that's a separate membership that we offer. We have locations all around town. So yeah, just keeping our eye on growth and trying to spread the composting gospel as it were. I love that. I, so I need to email you about taking, organizing a tour to the Awan organics, and I need it email you about maybe expanding some compost in a different state. So yes, absolutely. Okay. Let's see what you got. Yeah. Our conversation is not finished, but it is finished for this podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Like I really appreciate your time and for informing us about what composting is. Science behind it, and I love the science behind it. And thank you for being a member of scraps and helping organize all that and bringing composting to people outside of the Denver city. Thank you so much for having me. It's always fun to have conversations like this. I love your questions. I love getting into the nitty gritty stuff. This was really fun.
Hey podcast listeners. And thanks for turning back in to today's show of eco-friendly homes. And in our eco-friendly home today, we are talking about composting and I am a huge fan of composting and our guest speaker here today. Alexa Rosenstein. Also a huge fan of composting as she is the director of operations for scraps and scraps is a really, well-known very official composting service in our mile, high city of Denver and the surrounding areas. So nice to meet you, Alexa, and thanks for being on the show today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about composting and, and just share some, some tips and tricks for. Yeah. So is a scraps, the like official composting service. Like our governments and surrounding cities, because I know that cities will pick it up themselves, but y'all are like associated with, with so many different cities in our surrounding area. Yeah. So if you are a resident in Denver and you live in a single family home, or a condo slash apartment building with seven units or fewer. You can actually take advantage of the municipal program. So the city government of Denver provides a compost collection service for residents. Scraps is not affiliated with that program. And we actually came about as a result of the shortcomings of that program and not to diss the city's efforts or anything like that, but the limitation that they have. Seven units or fewer pretty obviously excludes a lot of apartment buildings. We live in a city, of course. So there's hundreds of apartment buildings that are much larger than seven units. And that's really when we decided that we needed to come in and do what we can to kind of serve those people who did not have access to the city's program. On top of that, the safe program is not. You're not able to participate if you are a business of any kind. So that is offices, restaurants, cafes, all sorts of businesses. So that was really our, our impetus for, for getting started to service residents and businesses all across the city. Nice. Yeah. You're so right. That that's like a huge gap, a seven or less, because, I mean, I don't think I've ever lived in an apartment. Or a house that has qualified for the government's program yet. And so that's, and I, you know, I I'm in real estate, so I help clients buy a variety of houses. I have a friend who bought a condo. I just helped a buyer buy an, a townhouse, but I don't know what the town I think is, does qualify because I think he has five in his row, but then it's like a larger complex and there's five in the other, but they do have the composting. Like waste bins in the back alley that the government would come and pick or the city would come and pick up. But scraps is, has really been amazing for us so far. I know you and I were emailing a little bit back and forth when I started with scraps and I was nervous about y'all's Ben type, because. I had only worked or use composting in my apartment once before with a different service who doesn't service in Jefferson county. And they were great too, but it had like a, a different lid. So I was a little bit nervous about that, but I actually just keep it outside on our patio and we use smaller. Composting baggies instead of like, like a three gallon bag we use just like small ones. And then, so I put maybe like six of them in there every week. So it gets pretty full. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's really great. I actually didn't know that much about composting before I moved to Denver and started working for scraps. And now I've been here three and a half years or something around there and now I feel. Somewhat of an expert when it comes to collection, at least. And I have one of our bins at my house. It's interesting because different, you know, tips and practices work for different types of people. But the one that you mentioned is really common where instead of having one bag in the bin, because Scott's only comes once per week for our residential members you can do multiple bags, tie them off. Not cold outside in the winter. It's really great to, to put the bin out on your patio where it just freezes and it's, you know, good to go. There's no smell. There's no moisture in the summer to kind of replicate that same scenario. We always recommend people try to keep your bin or maybe your smaller bags in the freezer. That really helps. Like I said, keep things contained, no smell, no mask. So there's a handful of little things that can really help you get from week to week. And some people really, their compost doesn't smell at all. So it kinda just depends on what you're eating, what you're throwing in there. Moisture content, all sorts of stuff like that. But that's our goal to just make it pretty simple. And aside from moving your scraps from what you would be throwing in the trash into a separate bin, we handle the collection. We handle all the messy stuff. You just set out your bin, we empty it and that's it. Yeah. Usually come to my house and pick up pretty early. I see the guy in his truck with all the other composting bags, and I wanted to ask him before if he would pick up our Christmas tree too, but I missed him cause he's so quick and early, we do and do Christmas trees. This is the first year that we. Tried to put it out there. We tried to get our larger apartments so that we could get more trees in one pickup. But it's something that we're exploring Christmas trees, yard waste. We do like pumpkins around Halloween and stuff like that. So that is an expanding area of the business. Simplified note, I actually did not carve a pumpkin this year. We have a vertical tower garden and my boyfriend and I, we grew pumpkin's on the tower garden. And so we actually they're like a Japanese type of pumpkin. They're really small. They're like a sweet pumpkin. They're really tasty. You can eat the skin. So I did not carve and waste a pumpkin. I actually ate my Halloween pumpkin and it's, it was really awesome. Yeah, but for people, you, you brought up a good point. Like you didn't, you weren't super familiar with composting before you moved to Denver. And I sort of have this luxury where I've known what composting is since I did this program in the island school, or that's what it was called, the island school. It was in Eleuthera in The Bahamas. If anyone's out there listening and you're in high school, definitely check out the island school and The Bahamas because it is well worth going to, and so I went for six weeks. And they have semester long programs, but I did the summer program and they taught us so much about like local ecology and eating local. I also got my first introduction towards like veganism there because they showed us the movie food, Inc. Yup. That'll do it. Yeah, that will do it. Which I'm not, I'm not vegetarian or vegan anymore. I did give it a good shot for a little while though. But that we also learned about composting. And so after every meal we would go over and we would scrape all of our food remains into the compost, really large trash plays, and they showed us the whole cycle of it too. Like this is what more composted or more de. Decomposed food looks like. And then it eventually turns into soil. And I know a lot of people like to use it for their house plants for their home gardens. I have very few amount of house plants, so they don't get any of my compost. But so, yeah, like there's so much to unpack here for people who do not know what composting is the first off, like, what is compost. Yes. Fantastic question. The way that I like to describe it, that I think is easiest to conceptualize is in the same way that we recycle our aluminum cans and glass bottles and cardboard. And we turn those into more paper, glass and aluminum. We can actually recycle our organic waste and turn it into compost. So like you said, instead of sending our food scraps to the landfill, which maybe we can get into a little bit more composting them actually essentially gives them another life and turns them into this new product that is really beneficial. How plants gardens agriculture on a large scale. And it has myriad benefits. It helps our soils retain moisture which especially in Colorado is important because we have wild flowers and it's wild flowers, wild fires Wildfires and just drought. It's super dry climate. So composting is organics recycling. You can take anything that was once alive. That's, you know, fruit and vegetable peelings. Maybe a health plant that didn't quite make it even trimming from your lawn, grass, clippings, or twigs. Same as with animal products. Has a little bit of a caveat because you can't as easily compost animal products. If you compost at home with say a backyard tumbler or something like that. But if you utilize an industrial composting facility, which is what scraps provides we can accept all of those animal products. And again, maybe that's something we can dive into more in a little bit, but taking all of those scraps, all of those uneaten peels and. And bones getting that through the composting process turns into finished compost, and then we can use it, apply it on our soils, et cetera. And like I said, give it kind of a new life. You actually said the brand's name in that sentence. I don't know if you caught that visa taking the scraps. Yeah, it was it very seamlessly, not as well. So, yeah, there's some really cool things. A few, a few directions we could go in here and first off, so you said the industrial composting. So the scraps is actually the first composting program I've ever used. And Denver has many to choose from many, you know, go compost, no matter what, like do not ignore it just because you prefer one brand over the other, just get. Compost service pickup, but scraps has actually been really amazing because y'all allow like meat products and dairy products where and I guess that's where the industrial composting comes in because you can take more of those, those animal products. And I did, I think I also asked you in our email, do y'all allow dog poop and the answer was no, but chicken bones like dairy products and that's con that's really uncommon. Yeah, it is. I think that thankfully it is becoming more common as municipalities like Denver and just small businesses, like scraps start to pop up around the country. I think organic waste is becoming a more on the forefront of people's minds. A little side note here, 40 to 50% of what we Americans send to the landfill in our trash is compostable waste. It's food waste primarily and then like paper products. So 40% of what we're sending to the landfill has the potential to not be sent to the landfill and to be composted instead the Northeast. Physically running out of space for landfill. So this is really kind of top of mind for them outside of, you know, that problem. It's also the right thing to do for various reasons. So yeah, I would say that businesses like us are popping up and utilizing industrial facilities is really. My perspective, the future, especially if this is going to scale this is not to say that if you're composting in your backyard, absolutely keep that up. It's fantastic. Especially if you are maybe an avid gardener or you just, you know, have a lot going on in your backyard and and you have trimmings. Clippings often, it's great to have your own pile that you can kind of, you know, brew yourself essentially. And then you have a finished product that you can use. However, like you mentioned, if you are, you know, a meat eater, animal products, Eggshells can be tough to break down in your home pile. Same with citrus, all that stuff. Or if you're someone like me who doesn't necessarily want to spend time in the backyard, turning my food, waste into piles and doing all that work that's where, you know, a service like ours comes in. So. Industrial facilities. We actually, the compost that we pick up at scraps is taken to a local facility called organics. They're super well-known in the composting industry. They're kind of the original and I think maybe the largest industrial facility on the Rocky mountain region. And what makes them industrial? I actually don't know too, too much about the science, but I have been to their facility taken tours and we work relatively closely with their team. They are just processing compost on a scale that is almost hard to imagine they have. Dozens and dozens of rows of compost that are a hundred, 200 yards long, you know, six or seven feet high, just full of composts. And they have of course machinery that can process that. And they are able to, because they're so closely monitoring. Essentially the status of these tiles. And because, you know, everyone who works there is, is much more intelligent than I am when it comes to the science of how composting works and although microorganisms at work they. Are able to I guess what's the right word to get those piles up to a high enough temperature for a certain amount of time. That is really, really difficult to do in your backyard on a small scale. So it's really temperature timeframe. I know that are two really important factors when it comes to industrial composting. Those things allow for the breakdown of things like meat and bones. Industrially compostable like plastic products, if anyone has ever come across, you know, a utensil or a cup that's compostable like a plant-based composting utensil or like dog poop bags. Since I mentioned that earlier. Yeah. Yeah. Those things are not going to break down in your backyard, but they will break down in this industrial setting. So I did not realize that you and I were going to be getting into the science about composting today. I just didn't think that we would get here, but I'm really glad that we are because you brought up some really good points that like the difference. Really between industrial composting and backyard composting, or like even community garden, composting is the technology and the science that they're able to use to speed up the composting process. And so I don't know how long, like backyard composting or community garden composting generally takes, but you also said, you know, if you leave your bin outside during the winter, that's fine. It will freeze them all. How many smell, or you can put it in the freezer. So it kind of goes like that, that whole picture of sort of painted right now, you know, like you're not going to be able to compost as well in your backyard in Colorado, because it's going to freeze for what five months out of the year. And then, and then, and then just the industrial composting, having that technology to, like I, assuming they're also like compressing the food together to kind of generate more heat, like internally and like maybe also have heat radiating onto it. But I have seen composting. At home, like machines that you can put on your countertops. And so you don't have to have like a compost collection service. You can just put all your food, waste your food scraps into this at home composting machine. And it takes like about a week to turn it into nutrient rich soil that you can then use in your garden or your house plants. So I think that's super interesting. It is interesting. And this is, I, I feel like I know. About some of this and some of it is still like amazing and a bit confusing to me. So one thing is so composting itself, as we mentioned is like organics recycling. You're turning your scraps into this finished soil amendment. The process of. Of scraps turning into here. I am plugging scrap again on inadvertently. Great. Thank you. Thank you for scraps for being here on the podcast today, I'll keep reminding everyone. So the, the process of turning your food. Into compost is it is all a due to the microbial activity that goes down. So there are certain bacteria and organisms that facilitate the decomposition of our food waste and turn it into food scraps. So essentially by ingesting the nutrients and stuff from our food waste. Like excretions are what compost is. And that sounds maybe a little bit gross, but these things are just absolutely microscopic tiny, tiny organisms. And compost itself is full of life. There is if you take a teaspoon or a tablespoon of finished compost, meaning that everything has been broken down and we have the final product in that teaspoon of compost, there are. More organisms than there are human beings on the planet. So there is so, so much activity going on in a compost pile. And you actually can compost in extremely cold temperatures. There are some methods to doing this. You have to, it also depends on your climate, et cetera, but keeping the pile covered is one thing to do. And also turning it is really important. Again, this is not necessarily what we at scrap do because we are a hauler. But if you compost at home or if you're curious about what goes on at the facility What goes on inside of a compost pile. That is it. So if you have your scrap bucket out for pickup, like you said, you leave it on your patio and it's, you know, it's February here. So it's going to freeze overnight. Those are not going to anything in there is not going to start breaking down because we haven't given it a chance. To essentially let those organisms come to life and start decomposing that stuff. When you put those food scraps into a compost pile, there are organisms at play. So you need that, that life, those bacteria, those organisms, you need air. So that's why compost tumblers. You have to turn them, or if you have a static pile on the ground, you have to turn it physically with. Pitchfork you have to have air in the pile so that those organisms can, can breathe essentially. And then you have to have moisture. So those are kind of the three requirements for our compost pile. If you're not turning your compost, essentially, if you're letting it sit out on your patio if there's no moisture and if those organisms can't survive, then that's, nothing's going to happen. So at the industrial facility, they actually kind of the opposite of what you mentioned instead of kind of compressing the food waste to, to generate heat. It's the opposite. We want to infuse air into it because maybe not, not to get too granular, but this is really important when it comes to the distinction between landfill, a landfill environment and a composting environment. I love the granular things. I I'd love that stuff. Very small details that like, No one ever blogs about, but I love that. Cool. Okay. So what's important here is, like I mentioned, these, these microbes, certain bacteria and microbes exist in what's called an anaerobic environment. That means there's no air, no oxygen present versus an aerobic environment. Where there is. That aerobic environment is corresponds to composting. As I mentioned, we have to turn the piles. We have to make sure that they're getting air and that they're moist enough so that these organisms can thrive in a landfill. This is actually, I think one of the most fascinating things that I first learned when I delve into the world of composting there's actually a fantastic documentary. It's called wastes. It used to be on Netflix. I hope it's still is super awesome. It's all about food waste and it goes into complex thing a little bit, highly recommended. Anyhow in that documentary. I heard this statistic that just absolutely blew my mind. I was just like, that cannot be true. So the fact was, if you take a head of lettuce, you put that head of lettuce in a landfill, and then you take, you know, a similar head of lettuce, put it in a compost pile. The head of lettuce that went to the landfill will not break down for 25 or more years. It will take that long and it might not even fully break down at that point, that head of lettuce in a compost pile will break down in a matter of weeks. And when it's finished, we will have this beautiful finished compost product. So in a landfill, as I mentioned earlier, we have an anaerobic environment. There's no air. So there, the bacteria that exists in a compost pile do not also exist in a landfill. They're basically completely different. And without those bacteria, things do not break down. So landfills, when we send our food waste there, when we send anything there, it's essentially intuned, which sounds a little bit weird, but nothing is decomposing because the life of these microbial organisms that are required to do the decomposing, they can't exist there. That's a little bit of, I guess, an overview of, of one of the main differences between composting and landfilling. But we need air, we need water and we need those organisms to do their work in breaking down our food waste and, and creating composts as essentially a very wonderful by-product of their digestion for lack of a better term. So the history of why we started creating landfill. Oh my gosh, pardon me? I was about to say, I wish I did. And then I realized, I wish I'm kind of glad I don't, because I'm sure it's the history that, you know, why. You so many fossil fuels and why their plastics industry is as big as it is. I don't know the answer. That's a little bit of a cynical response, but the listeners will understand I don't know the history of a landfill either, unfortunately, but I also wish that I did just, I should've looked it up before this episode because that would be very. It just seems like during the industrial era, when sort of all of our modern systems came into to be like people were living in a very simple lifestyle, like people definitely grew their own food and like, maybe while they did throw it away in some way, shape or form, like I said, you know, neither of us know the history of this, I'm just kind of guessing here. But like, there's definitely people who grew their own food and like through their own. Like scraps into their yard and probably definitely knew how to compost and like how to turn old food scratch. I, I'm just curious like how that large disconnect became and you know, I'm wondering maybe people just didn't know the serious Repercussions that would have come from putting everything into a landfill because I'm 27. And so when you tell me that ahead of lettuce has been in a landfill in tomb for as long as I've been alive, my parents could have ordered lettuce from there, sort of picked up lettuce from the grocery store, like the day before my birth. And then they like got, had a baby and then like a week later, the lettuce was bad. It could have gone that could literally have had. Yes. I think about this a lot where I'm like, oh my gosh, I'll have random flashbacks of plastic products that I've used or just, you know, growing up. I'm like that Ziploc bag that I used to bring to school every day with a sandwich in it. All of my Ziploc baggies are sitting in a landfill and they will outlive me by like hundreds and hundreds of years. Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's really. Interesting and sad that we have come from. Like I don't, I remember learning about world war two era. People had victory gardens where they, you know, grew their food. And, and I think that we used to have, and of course, you know, indigenous people way before Americans came to colonizers, came to America. There's we used to have such a. A more intimate relationship with our food and how it gets to us, the growth process, cultivating it, harvesting it, and just having much more of a connection to it. And now you know, in some ways, certainly for better, but also in a lot of ways, for worse, we, the convenience of going to a grocery store and buying things pre-packaged and all that stuff is we there's a distance between. Us and, and how we get that food. And like, we're not supposed to have, you know, avocados year round here in Denver. We're not supposed to have, you know, fish here that are nowhere caught in our, you know, streams and lakes in Colorado, all sorts of examples like that. And so I think that, like you said, I think there's totally been. At distancing, a separation between us and the food that we eat. And I think that that has also contributed to this concept of throwing things away. And how away is this, you know, far away place in our mind, because. Passing by a landfill every day and seeing what we're contributing to. We just throw it in the bin. Someone picks it up and it's off of our minds. So a lot of contributing factors to, to how we've gotten to where we are now. Well, if y'all ever, just, since you were saying with the landfill is like a way and out of your mind and you know, the same thing sort of happens with my compost. Like I put my compost out, it's gone. I don't know where it goes. So if scraps, every wants to do. A tour of a one organics for, for people in the Denver community. I would absolutely join. I would absolutely bring some people along. Maybe we can email about that later. But I would love to see where my composting goes and like, see what the Awan organics, industrial composting factory turns that into, because I know like for the municipal composting that gets turned into. Eco cycle, right? Go grow eco grub. Okay. Eco cycle is a different program within the municipality, but he go grow. So yeah, our, our municipal compost eco grow. And I would just love to have more eyes on that process, especially because of. I recycle. And I know that that can kind of be a broken chain and like it has broken in the past, which is why people are sort of skeptical of it now. And different cities, like same with composting allow different things like some do take clamshell containers. Some do not take same with chicken bones. And real quick, just, just for you and the listeners, since we were talking about like food in the grocery store, like the avocados and things like that. I have a previous episode with Elizabeth bolus, the ingredient insider, and she is wicked smart and she gets really, really into all of that with the grocery store. But my trash, so my boyfriend and I, we compost. And we recycle, and then we have our regular trash of just, I don't even know what's in there really, except for like bags that things come in and like just things that you just can't recycle pretty much. Cause we, we throw everything in the compost now. But I don't have trash anymore. I basically don't have trash. Like they could actually come and I really want to like see what we can do to make this actually happen. Especially for people who have composting in there, like seven or less homes, people don't need weekly trash pickup and bi-weekly recycling pickup. We actually need weekly recycling pickup, weekly compost pickup, and bi-weekly trash pickup because my trash came on Tuesday and granted, we were out of town this week, but our trash comes every Tuesday and our compost comes every Wednesday. I didn't have any trash. I literally put the trash bin out and I opened it. I was like, did they come already? I just put the trash bin now, did they come? What happened? We just didn't have any trash to speak. Cause we were out of town this weekend. I looked down in there to see what there was. There was like a few bags of dog poop. I know I've talked about dog poop a lot on this episode. I think it's kind of relevant. He's a little dog, so they're tiny bags, but I had like two bags of those in there. Cause I didn't want to put them inside the house one day and then I had. An Amazon. Like terrible bag. And I was like, oh my God. And then I looked at my compost bin and I had, you know, four of my tiny bags of compost. It has drastically reduced the amount of trash that we put out every week. There's maybe one or two bags of trash that definitely. Maybe to like, I don't even know if we have friends over or something, you know, but even, so we actually had friends over for friends giving we hosted 22 people in our house. Okay. That was a lot. I know, like everyone can think of like 22 people that you know, but to have everyone in your living room is like a lot. And after everyone got finished eating. My friend, Bella and I, we made sure that all the food scraps went into the composting bins and we just piled it out there. So I don't know if everyone was super busy after Thanksgiving, but it has drastically reduced the amount of trash that we have just from putting our food scraps in a different bin. Yeah. Yeah, there was, I mentioned this earlier on a bigger scale kind of nationwide. The average city or the average residents and 40% of what they send to the landfill is organic waste of food scraps, et cetera. There was actually a. A study done in our city of Denver couple of years ago. And they found that 50% of what residents throw in their trash in Denver can be composted. So I noticed the same thing that you just described when I started composting there. Don't take out my kitchen, trash bins for, and it's, you know, a standard sized trash bin. I probably take out one bag every, maybe three weeks. And like you said, it's just, and it's mostly packaging from food, which I tried to avoid, but in some cases I can't, and it's mostly plastic. While I'm on that note, I might take a moment to plug a new program that just came to Denver called red. They are awesome. They are a hard to recycle. Pickup service. So essentially in the same way that scraps works with your compost, you just set out a bin and we empty it. Red whale does the same thing. You get a bin, you fill it with plastic film, which is by far the most the category that I take advantage of the most, they also take batteries and light bulbs old clothing that you can't donate, or maybe if you don't feel like donating it. And then they have like rotating categories. So highly recommend. Really really useful service. And even through using that composting plus Bridwell taking a lot of my plastic film. I'm taking out the trash even less. So it's such a good feeling. And it's, it's really nice to see that you're, you're physically, you can see how much you are diverting from the landfill, which is just to me, helps me sleep at night. But to your point about. Our, our city services. You are, I have talked to probably like a dozen people at this point with who are frustrated by the fact that our recycling only comes every other week and our trash comes every week. And I don't even roll my trash bin to the. Maybe like once every six to eight weeks, it's just, I have a, I rent and I have a really, really big one and I will never ever fill it up. And so all that to say it kind of seems like the incentives are reversed in a way. For our city for, for waste aversion, which is, you know, recycling and composting. There is an initiative in, I think it's up to city government at this point it's been kind of in the works across the state for a while, but it's called a pay as you throw. And that is, yeah, it's, it's really cool. It's a program for, I think the initiative is just for the city and county of Denver, but the idea. That every household gets a recycling bin and a composting bin, because right now, if you don't ask for the city's programs or obviously if you don't subscribe to a company like scrap you don't get it and you have to pay extra it's about $10 a month for the city's program. A little bit more for the scraps program. And with this pay, as you throw, every household would get recycling and composting for free, and then you would pay for your trash depending on the size of your trash bin, the smaller, the trash bin, the lower fee that you pay each month. So kind of putting the incentives in place to encourage people. Hey, you should think about recycling and composting first and getting a smaller trash bin if you can saving a little money. So that's, I think that's a pretty interesting initiative and could be pretty helpful. Yeah, I like that. I do wonder if they could like change the trash bin instead of like doing a size of the trash bin, because then I imagine they're going to have to create more smaller trash bins. Like what would people do with all these large bins? They can add like a weight measuring system onto like the. Trash pickup call or something like that. Just the thought. So. As far as the landfills go and like greenhouse gases, because composting is super relevant for combating methane in the atmosphere. And they'll talk about that a lot on your website, which I definitely appreciate. So on your website, just on the homepage, more than 1.5 million pounds of organic waste have been kept out of the landfills since 2017. And how does, and then it says this helps protect our climate preventing tons of greenhouse gases, mainly methane from being emitted. And there's been over a million pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent. How am I trying to say this? Yeah. Taken out of the environment. Yeah, because of composting with scraps, just scrap. Just scrapped. Yeah. So imagine, you know, everyone's composting efforts and the statistics behind that. It's huge. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really wild. And I was actually trying to look into this yesterday. I got pretty deep into this like scientific report about methane emissions from landfills. And it was slightly over my head, even though I did learn a few things. So I don't know. Exactly how to quantify essentially the, the, the amount of methane that our food waste contributes. But I do know a couple of things about landfills and methane and all that stuff. So listen, If you were to essentially aggregate all the landfills in America and kind of label it as like its own state landfills would be the third largest emitter of methane of any industry, any place Obviously a huge, huge problem methane itself when compared to CO2 carbon dioxide is 20 to 50 times more potent as a greenhouse gas when released into our atmosphere. So it's 20 to 50 times better at capturing and retaining heat. So it's way more problematic. Landfills, like I mentioned earlier, when we were talking about aerobic versus anaerobic in that anaerobic landfill environment, the breakdown that does happen, which is on a smaller scale when it does happen, it emits methane. That's the by-product instead of, kind of the by-product we talked about in composting, which is the compost itself, the by-product of decomposition in a landfill is methane. So. A lot of landfills. This is so scary to me, but a lot of landfills are just constantly, constantly emitting methane, and they actually hype that methane out. And a lot of landfills just have a burning pipe of methane that runs 24 hours a day, just burning a flame of methane into the atmosphere. Horrifying. It's not really fair. It's not really fair to like all the people who make videos about going vegan that are saying, you know, in cows, I just, because cows are relevant in the vegan videos. That's the only reason I talk about this. But like, you know, we're talking about how, how animals, cows, Bart, and they put out methane into the atmosphere, but more practical. Thing that we all already do. We don't even have to like make a dietary change to reduce the amount of methane that's in the atmosphere, because that's really a, a big thing for a lot of people, you know, dietary changes. Like some people are already on restricted diets and cannot make that change, for example. Or like, then you're having to say, okay, all the restaurants have to make the change. The industries have to make the change. Whereas if we just get everyone composting, that's reduced. 40 to 50% of, of the things that are in the landfill and, and correct me if I'm wrong, but does the food, so you were saying how the microbiomes in the composting turn into this really rich nutrient is it soy. I'm just byproduct it's I think the best way to refer to compost finished compost is a soil amendment. So it's, you wouldn't plant your plants directly in it and you use it to infuse nutrients in your soil. So it's amending your soil. Okay. So it creates this amendment of soil. That's really, life-giving very nutrient rich, amazing, beautiful. I let you call it beautiful earlier, a beautiful product versus like lettuce, not decomposing. And so it's actually just releasing methane. And then if the lettuce does decompose, because it's in the landfill with like batteries and tampons, it's not a nutrient rich system, either it is or diapers or whatever. It's like full of full of these other chemicals and like toxic leaks. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Compost. Yeah. We're not, when we send things to the landfill, we don't, we're not attempting at any point to get them back in any way. There is some, some efforts to capture the methane that is released from landfills, and I've kind of seen this kind of pop up more and more. And it's, it's interesting because I don't think that that is the future. It's certainly. We do not need to be sending more to the landfill to be able to get more methane. That's like so perverse in my mind. But you know, if we can capture the methane, that's already being admitted, I guess. Why not? That's cool. But like you said, to divert that waste is ultimately just apples and oranges. Like you, there's no comparison in my mind of the two diverting them creating compost and, and the various applications of compost. Beneficial. Whereas sending things to landfill is in no way beneficial. So the, the use of compost as well, the composting process when our food waste is being decomposed and digested by these microorganisms. That whole process itself. There are very, very, very few emissions from just like the digestion. And the emissions that do occur are multiple times offset by the benefits that come from compost. This is actually one of the things I read about in that article. I read yesterday. Which I already knew, but I kind of got a little bit more of like scientific backing when I was reading that. But applying compost, as I mentioned earlier is obviously the benefit is if you've ever applied it to your, to your garden or to your house plants, it is a fertilizer itself because it is so nutrient rich in a lot of cases, applying compost re means that you do not have to apply any sort of artificial. Fertilizers at all. And there's growing movement around what's called regenerative agriculture, which is essentially a collection of practices to help us better manage our lands and move away from harmful practices like killing but also using pesticides and herbicides that. In our plants in our water, et cetera. So compost over time is even on huge, huge acres of land, you know, industrial agriculture settings can eventually with these other regenerative practices, take the place of needing to use pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers and all that stuff. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a really, really important point. Another plug that I will put in here for another documentary, but I also could not recommend more. It's called kiss the ground. It's on Netflix. It was another one that just blew my mind. Absolutely. My jaw was just for like two hours afterwards. I was like, I can't even believe how amazing this was. So definitely go watch, kiss the ground. The, the, the benefits of regenerative, agriculture and composting, which is a key component of regenerative agriculture. Our judges. W are almost in comprehensible. If we were to manage our, our lands in this way, using compost, allowing our soil to infiltrate more water and absorb and hold more water fighting droughts. It's. A holistic way of managing lands. You mentioned earlier cows and methane emissions from like burping and farting. That is a big problem. And part of the reason that's a big problem is because of the way that we manage our cattle. The week have them in what's called concentrated. Cappo something. I forget the meaning of, someone's probably like cringing hearing this. I think it's concentrated animal feed operations, and that's if you've ever been driving or if you've seen these vegan videos, any videos where you see animals in these packed Watts just with no green space that is such a concentration of. Of emissions, methane, et cetera. There is a way to it's called managed grazing. You can integrate animals and nature coexist before humans came in and disrupted things. And, you know, we thought that we had a better idea by separating the. If you combine animals and land management there, it's a beautiful synergy that happens. And any who I won't get into it, cause that's not my area of expertise, but watch the video. Yeah. We have to watch the video to know what it is that you're leaving us on the cliff for what happens there. Well, Alexa, I know where we're at. We're like past our original designated time. So I just want to ask you one more question before I let you go. And thank you for staying a little bit over my, a little bit where, what are scraps goals for the future? So like is your goal to have composting and everyone, a compost bin and like all the apartments downtown, or like, what are y'all's goals? Yes, I think right now our net is cast pretty wide when it comes to our goals. We have because the city of Denver has the municipal program that we've referenced a couple of times. We're hoping that that program expands just for the city sake and for humanity sake. But until that happens, we definitely are focused on upping our numbers, both residential and commercial in the city of Denver. And then over the past two years, we've really been trying to focus on the kind of surrounding suburbs of Denver too who don't have access to any sort of municipal service. So we have. Increased our service area for our pickup residential service to Lakewood wheat Ridge, Broomfield, Arvada. We're kind of moving more in the west Western direction. Westminster, I live in Queensland, I'm in wheat Ridge. So I totally appreciate that. Y'all have done that because when I moved out here, I lost my ability to comp. And then I had previously been doing so. Thank you. Thank you. So yeah, we, we want to get as many people composting as possible. We are being. Approach. We actually just kind of a little bit of a backstory. We started off scrap downtown Denver was kind of our headquarters and we started as a bike based company. So we used to do all of our collections on bikes and electronic trikes. We loved that and we actually held onto those for over three years, maybe four years. And. Only recently outgrew those and decided that we had to become vehicle based because we were just handling so much volume. And so a little bit bittersweet, but now we actually recently just purchased our first commercial CDL truck. So just picture like your standard trash truck. We have one of those now for compost, which is just something that I don't think either and no one on our team really ever envisioned happening. So. We are definitely growing. We're always looking for momentum. We're always looking for new areas to bring our service. So if anyone listening is interested in composting, feel free to look us up. Scrap smile, high.com. Reach out to me. My email should be on the website. But yeah. Tell your friends about composting. We have drop-off programs as well. So if you don't happen to live in our service area, or if you'd rather just be able to drop off your compost any time, that's a separate membership that we offer. We have locations all around town. So yeah, just keeping our eye on growth and trying to spread the composting gospel as it were. I love that. I, so I need to email you about taking, organizing a tour to the Awan organics, and I need it email you about maybe expanding some compost in a different state. So yes, absolutely. Okay. Let's see what you got. Yeah. Our conversation is not finished, but it is finished for this podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Like I really appreciate your time and for informing us about what composting is. Science behind it, and I love the science behind it. And thank you for being a member of scraps and helping organize all that and bringing composting to people outside of the Denver city. Thank you so much for having me. It's always fun to have conversations like this. I love your questions. I love getting into the nitty gritty stuff. This was really fun.
