DETROIT, MI (WOWO) Coffee grounds, eggshells, vegetable peels and leftover food are becoming a growing business as composting companies across the country offer to pick up kitchen scraps and keep them out of landfills. In Detroit, Scrap Soils collects food waste from homes and restaurants, then deli vers it to a composting site where the material is transformed into nutrient-rich soil. The service is part of a growing effort to make composting easier for people who don’t have the space to do it at home, access to municipal pickup or a convenient drop-off location. Food waste creates a significant environmental problem when it ends up in landfills, where it produces methane as it breaks down. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. Emily Cassidy, a research associate with the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown, says composting can help reduce those emissions while returning nutrients to the soil. She describes cutting methane emissions as a way to apply the emergency brake to climate change, because the gas can have a substantial impact on the climate over a relatively short period. Composting also can support local food production by returning nutrients from discarded food to the ground. Scrap Soils co-founder and CEO Ricky Blanding launched the Detroit company in 2020. The 34-year-old native Detroiter now serves more than 70 homes and businesses with weekly pickups. Residential service starts at 15 dollars a month. Business customers pay at least 60 dollars monthly, with the price depending on how much material they produce. The company’s customers include The Grand Porter restaurant in southwest Detroit. Executive chef Lou Hammer says the kitchen fills its collection bin with eggshells, cardboard, stale bread, tomato tops and avocado skins. Hammer says using the service requires little additional work because the food scraps were already being collected before being thrown away. Now, they go into a designated bag for composting instead. After a weekly route covering more than 100 miles and lasting about nine hours, Blanding delivers the collected material to Sanctuary Farms in Detroit. Apple cores, spoiled pumpkins, corn husks and other compostable scraps are turned into a soil additive that can be purchased for use by gardeners and farmers. Blanding says the challenge is expanding a small operation while convincing more people to participate. The company hopes to purchase a larger truck, acquire its own property and composting equipment, and raise money to qualify for a matching state grant. Education is another important part of the process. Customers need to know what can be composted and how to prepare it properly, including removing produce stickers from fruit and vegetable peels. Detroit is also expanding its own food waste efforts. The city launched its first municipal food scrap drop-off initiative during the past year, giving residents a central location to bring scraps collected at home. Hundreds of residents registered to participate, and Scrap Soils helped with the city’s educational campaign. The city plans to add drop-off locations and introduce composting at municipal buildings. Those efforts are part of a broader climate strategy that calls for diverting 15% of waste from landfills through a three-year initiative. Detroit’s long-term climate strategy also calls for eliminating municipal greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Other communities are developing similar services, including Denver, Nashville, Atlanta, Raleigh, Durham and Asheville. A 2023 report from BioCycle, a publication focused on composting and recycling, identified 400 municipally supported residential food scrap collection programs nationwide. About 230 offered curbside pickup. Detroit Sustainability Director Tepfirah Rushdan says composting and recycling give residents accessible ways to support the city’s environmental goals. For companies like Scrap Soils, the challenge is turning those individual efforts into a larger operation that can keep more food out of landfills and return its nutrients to the soil. The post Food Waste Is a Major Landfill Problem. These Companies Want Your Scraps appeared first on WOWO News/Talk 92.3 FM and 1190 AM. ...read more read less