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When chef Bryan Weaver moved to Nashville from the West Coast in 2015, he was shocked by the effort it took to establish a compost system for his new restaurant.
'Composting was a really big part of the culture [in Portland],” he says. 'Every restaurant you went to had compost. I moved out here and had a hard time finding anybody who could do it.”
Enter Compost Nashville. Established in 2014, Compost Nashville is Music City's only food waste pick-up program for households and small-scale restaurants. Operations manager Matthew 'Beadle” Beadlecomb says composting is the next recycling: a crucial way to reduce waste and protect the earth, but one that requires a lot of education and infrastructure to become a norm.
'It's like what happened with the environmental movement: It slowly built up,” he says. 'People now understand that throwing away a plastic water bottle is not correct, but there's a disconnect about where their food comes from.”
And where it goes. Beadlecomb says that people ask him, 'Doesn't it just compost in the landfill?”
When organic materials like banana peels and eggshells decompose anaerobically, which is what happens when they're buried in a landfill, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas that's 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Methane doesn't last as long in the atmosphere as CO2, but the Environmental Defense Fund calculates that a quarter of today's global warming is caused by human-induced methane emissions. Landfills are responsible for around 40 percent of all methane emissions.
But the tide is slowly shifting. Two years ago, Compost Nashville served just two customers. Now, the company boasts 35 households, plus 10 businesses, as customers. Compost Nashville picks up food scraps from these customers and breaks them down aerobically to produce nutrient-rich compost for gardeningliterally turning trash into treasure.
But compost pick-up is not cheap. Weaver's restaurant, Butcher and Bee, which seats 85 in its main dining room, pays Compost Nashville $300 per month. Baker Claire Meneely, who owns Dozen Bakery on Hagan Street, says she pays about $83 per month. Beadlecomb says the main driver of cost is lack of infrastructure.
'Right now, we're basically the only people doing this, and we're doing it on a small scale with limited resources,” he says.
Businesses that work with Compost Nashville receive window stickers to let clients know they're 'green,” and Compost Nashville provides each client with an annual report on the amount of waste diverted. Businesses save a little money by diverting organic materials from their trash, and homeowners earn compost for their gardens. But when it comes down to it, Compost Nashville's customers pay for pickup because they care.
'In my head, it's more of an ethical thing,” Weaver says. 'A lot of food gets wasted as it is, especially in a restaurant, so to be able to turn that back into something usable is really important.”
Beadlecomb says his dream for Nashville is metro curbside compost pick-up. As the National Resources Defense Council announced Nashville as a pilot city for food waste-reduction programs earlier this year, a curbside composting dream doesn't seem so fanciful after all.