CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Crown Town Compost started with a bike and a mission. From originally helping 10 Charlotte households reduce environmental impact, the mission has grown much larger.
Co-owner David Valder said using a bike at the start was fun, but created limits on Crown Town Compost's impact. Years later, that impact has certainly stretched to serve the greater Mecklenburg County area.
"We're approaching 1,000 customers between households, apartments, restaurants, other commercial spaces as well," Valder said. "We're doing about 200 tons of food waste on an annual basis. So quite a bit, still only less than 1% of the whole city's food waste, but getting there."
Composting enables anyone -- whether an individual or an entire company -- to take food waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill and use it to make or improve soil that restarts the process of growing food.
How it works
It's a simple process aimed at making a big difference. A household working with Crown Town Compost can register online for the service, then will receive a 24-gallon bin to keep outside and a smaller bucket to keep in the kitchen to pair with a compostable trash bag.
Once a week, the bucket should get dumped into the 24-gallon bin. Then every two weeks, Crown Town Compost will pick up the compost, or the customers can choose to visit a drop-off location for a reduced price.
Roughly 200,000 tons of food waste come out of Mecklenburg County each year and go to the landfill, Valder said, adding that amount of food waste is enough to fill the tallest building in Uptown Charlotte from top to bottom.
Put another way, he referenced Bank of America Stadium, saying 200,000 tons of food waste would cover the width of the field and 20 miles long and two feet deep.
Crown Town Compost is hoping to reduce how much of that food waste makes it to the landfill, aiming instead to put nutrients from that food waste back into the environment through composting.
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That mission has been extended through the Innovation Barn in Charlotte's Belmont neighborhood, which Crown Town Compost has called home for nearly a year.
Crown Town Compost
The Innovation Barn itself is a partnership between the City of Charlotte and Envision Charlotte, focused on working with zero-waste initiatives to bring Charlotte toward a circular economy, meaning taking what could be thrown out and giving it new life.
At the facility, the Innovation Barn takes multiple approaches into participating in that circular economy -- including using black soldier fly larvae to break down the food waste.
"[They're] like nature's garbage disposals for food waste," Valder said. "They can take a massive amount of food waste, and convert it into insect mass."
Working with the community
Cristina Veale and CJ Toscano had the circular economy in mind when they chose to work with Crown Town Compost and Crown Town Landscapes.
"Being able to take our food scraps and essentially take what we eat and consume and be able to turn that into soil, which then gets reused for our garden bed, is really a beautiful circular way to reduce our waste and eventually make something new out of it," Veale said.
Toscano said in addition to wanting to compost and reduce their carbon footprint, the idea of working with a local company to achieve those goals seemed to be the obvious solution.
"One thing to consider is just the footprint, the carbon footprint that you have from transporting materials, the food themselves, keeping them refrigerated," Toscano said. "If we're working with a local company, you know, that's just another way that we could reduce any impact that we would have."
Crown Town Compost works with clients on any scale, from a household kitchen to a stadium.
The Kannapolis Cannon Ballers said they started working with Crown Town Compost as part of the team's mission to reduce environmental impact, beginning with food waste.
"What we wanted to do was different than anything they typically provide, but they appreciated the goal and are committed to the same values so have consistently helped us come up with creative solutions as we implement composting at the ballpark," a Kannapolis Cannon Ballers spokesperson said, in part, in a statement. "Working with local contacts has made it great, because they’re able to be more responsive and more innovative."
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Valder said for those interested in starting to compost, they're here to help.
"We knew that there are people who wanted to compost and knew it was the right thing to do," Valder said. "Maybe you didn't have the time, space, know-how, or just didn't want to deal with it. So it's kind of just like a way of making it easier to do the right thing for the planet."
Contact Emma Korynta at ekorynta@wcnc.com and follow her on Twitter.