Transcription of Tyler Frank for the show Treasuring our Trash #247
Lisa: People who have been listening to the radio show for a while know that I’m a big fan of compost. I can’t deny it. I think that composting is a beautiful thing, and the individual I’m going to talk with next also believes that compost is a beautiful thing, I hope, I think. This is Tyler Frank, who grew up backyard composting in North Yarmouth, Maine. After graduating from Cheverus in Portland, he attended Boston College majoring in economics. After returning to Portland, Frank explored a number of career avenues, starting a web company with a friend, working for a car dealership, and running for the Maine House of Representatives. Shortly thereafter, Garbage to Garden took root, Maine’s first curbside composting program and the most successful program like it in the United States. Congratulations.
Tyler: Thank you very much.
Lisa: This is good stuff. I love that you have done so many different things and they have brought you back to composting.
Tyler: Yes. I’m kind of just a lifelong entrepreneur, which I mean in the broadest sense of the word. I have a lot of different interests. I like to create things, and creating an organization like Garbage to Garden has been definitely the most difficult and most rewarding so far.
Lisa: Tell me about the whole economics major, “I think I’ll work on compost.” It seems like as an entrepreneur, there might be other things, like web design or some of these other things that you’ve done.
Tyler: Yes. Well, economics is just something that I’m personally interested in, economics and history. When it comes to composting, it just seemed to me that it was something that was needed, therefore an opportunity. I had started a web development company with my best friend James, who I grew up with, in 2007, I want to say. That was just because he had the skills. He was a developer and a designer and I thought I could sell ice to an Eskimo, so together, our powers, we could do that and be self-employed. We learned a lot because we grew really quickly, and then we grew too quickly, and then we couldn’t sustain the revenue and kind of blew up the company. We were young and learned a lot of lessons.
I brought some of that to Garbage to Garden, and bootstrapping something from nothing, it was very much like, “Don’t spend money until you’ve earned it.” You were just starting off with a few hundred dollars, buying twelve buckets, and then getting a few more sign ups at a farmer’s market and going out and buying some more buckets and just kind of turning it over and working for free, but the reason that I got into doing that at the time that I did is I had just left a very full-time career at Lee Toyota, moved to Portland, because I had been living in North Yarmouth, and when I moved to Portland, I found myself in a second floor apartment that shared a tiny yard and there was no space to compost at all, so for the first time in my life, something that had just been every day and normal was impossible. We’re buying these blue bags and throwing food in them, and it just didn’t feel right.
It was actually my room mate’s comment that if we could just put it at the curb like recycling, it’d be easy to compost it. It got my gears turning, and having been acquainted with the Portland community, it just seemed like something that wasn’t offered and that a lot of people might appreciate. I didn’t really know if I could do it and financially make it make sense, but I just went after it, and it’s worked out.
Lisa: I had the same experience that you’re describing. If you bend composting, if you have a pile, if you have a rotator, to put it in a bag that’s going to then go to a landfill and then not biodegrade, or if so, not for millions of years, but there’s something wrong. That just seems wrong, not like a sin, but it just doesn’t work.
Tyler: Yes. Now when I’m at an event and there’s no option for where to throw my napkin other than the trash, it’s like holding it above the trash can for the few fateful seconds, and then like, okay, I guess I have to to let it go. It doesn’t feel right, but it was really something that most people in an urban area like Portland had no choice but to do.
One thing that was interesting was I had the philosophy of fail fast, fail cheap. If it wasn’t going to work, I didn’t want to put all kinds of time and money into trying to make it work, so I launched Garbage to Garden six weeks after having the idea with no preparation at all, no plan of how to pick up buckets or where to compost them or how this was going to work at all. I just sort of made a web site, conceived of a service, picked a number, a price out of thin air that I thought people would maybe pay that would justify the service, and it just was a lot of luck that it worked out. They were bringing food waste to my mom’s backyard in North Yarmouth for six weeks probably, maybe two months, until my mom was like, “Tyler, no more. This is getting out of hand.”
On that note, actually, I at one point had eighteen 55 gallon drums, full, sealed, in her driveway, and she’s like, “Tyler, I said no more of this,” and I’m like, “Mom, I’m not going to empty them. I know. I just need a place to put these. The code enforcement officer’s all over me on Vespa Street in Portland and I’m going to figure something out soon. I’m on it.” It was this one particular Wednesday morning, Wednesday’s our big day, and at this time in September 2012, we already required a trailer to collect all the material from the households that day, and we needed barrels to fill, and they were all full already in North Yarmouth. I had just found Benson Farm in Gorham, and so that morning I was able to go get barrels, bring them to the farm, empty them out, and then go do a collection route and just scraped by there, thanks to my mom’s kindness and generosity. Actually, that area of her yard is very lush. I had a pretty good-sized pile of food scraps, and now it’s all overgrown.
Lisa: I do love the story. I’m just thinking if one of my kids did this to me, I’d be like, “Are you kidding me? Do I really need to have an entire driveway full of barrels or an enormous pile of somebody else’s food scraps in my backyard?” That’s a lot of patience and support of you.
Tyler: Yes. I’m really lucky that my mom has been supportive of just about everything, although at that point I think she didn’t think it was going to work out. She thought she was just going to end up with a huge pile of food waste and be holding the bag so to speak, but yes, we got 174 households in our first month that signed up. It was scrambling for sure, but after partnering with farms and finding a little commercial space we could operate out of, at least the sort of death threats were gone. We were off the ground a little bit, and then it was just a lot of work to build it up and add trucks and keep them on the road. I actually lived in a tent the following summer at the shop just to make ends meet.
Lisa: This is something that I don’t think a lot of people think about. Strangely in this day and age, a lot of us think start-up venture capital, you get a lot of money, you throw it at something, and then you become successful because you get that kind of financial support, but you’re talking about get a little money, invest, get a little bit more money, invest some more. You’re talking about very steady but mindful growth.
Tyler: Yes, exactly. You might call it bootstrapping. There’s a lot to be said for that. Certainly these days all you hear about is the idea of being an entrepreneur is just what you said, get a business plan, get somebody to give you a bunch of money, and then your idea comes to fruition, but there are other ways to do it, and one doesn’t exclude the other. We’re looking at we’re probably going to be raising money in the future as we go to expand and scale into other states, but this was my baby, I suppose. To be able to create it without that outside venture capital help has allowed us to stay true to our mission, to really be able to build an organization and an image that we wanted or I wanted without an outside influence from somebody who’s writing the checks. I think that that’s been important, at least in this endeavor.
Lisa: Tell me about the logistics. I know I was telling you about where I live, I see the little buckets by the roadside, and I’ll know it’s Garbage to Garden day. I live out on Little John Island, but you service a pretty broad area.
Tyler: Yes. We service one in six Portland households, and then also we service a good number in South Portland, in Westbrook, Valmouth, Cumberland, Yarmouth, as you say, and even Brunswick, and then we do commercial service, which is done differently, but the same idea for businesses and schools and bakeries and restaurants from Old Orchard Beach to Freeport. We do colleges. The residential program has definitely been our big claim to fame, and I think we’ve been so successful because of the clean buckets making it so easy. It’s on your trash day. We make it rewarding because you get the finished compost back, so hopefully that encourages more local food production, and also the accessibility piece of it’s free if you volunteer with us, so there’s really no reason not to do it if you care about where your waste goes and you need a way to compost. Logistics, there’s a lot to it. I went from just sort of having an idea to now knowing quite a bit about running a trucking operation, which is a good skill to have. There’s a lot of things you can apply that to. I could take logistics in a lot of directions.
Lisa: Well, yes. When I was interviewing the guy from Ecomaine, who talks about solid waste, and he doesn’t mean solid waste like human waste. He means stuff that goes to possibly landfills, possibly recycling, that sort of thing, but he talked about the ick factor of composting. He’s a big fan of composting, but there is the ick factor. Talk to me a little bit about that.
Tyler: Yes. So someone’s thinking about joining our program, they’re like, “Well, is it going to smell? I’m going to have this bucket full of all these food scraps that’s degrading in my house.” It’s like, “Well, yes, but you’re going to have that in your trash.” You already, in fact, have that in your trash bag, so in one sense, being able to take all that smelly stuff out of your trash and put it in something else that’s sealed that gets picked up every week allows you to maybe keep your trash around and not put that bag out every week and stuff it full. Some people can go six weeks with one trash bag, so in that sense, you’re making it cleaner, but there’s the perception that it’s gross. It would be if we didn’t wash the buckets, for example, and we just dumped that thing out and you had this bucket with grime smeared all over it, then that might turn you off to it a bit. It’s a bit of work, but I think that that has allowed us to make a very effective program for everybody.
The compost that you get back is certainly not gross. It has a little earthy smell. The home composting even, to do it right, you’ve got to get in there. You’ve got to turn your pile around, you’ve got to flip it over. There’s other challenges that maybe aren’t the ick factor, like just getting out in the snow to dump it somewhere or just the space or the time. There’s a lot of reasons why it’s tough for people to do it on their own, and the ick factor is a major one.
Lisa: I think there’s also sometimes convincing the other people in the household that they want to be a part of this. I know that my children, who for many years, I made them do the compost run, because my parents made me do the compost run. There’s the compost day, you go put the compost in the compost pile. They were reluctant, because it’s not necessarily a fun job in January when you actually have to shovel a way out to the compost pile. The convincing of people sometimes can be tricky.
Tyler: A lot of people don’t like change. I think you need at least one member in the household who’s really dedicated to the change. It’s like, “Honey, no. We’re doing it this way. You’re just going to have to deal with it.” That’s sort of how change happens in the real world. You mentioned seeing a bucket on the street and then seeing another one, then a couple months later, another one. I think that that probably goes a long way to legitimize a new way of doing things. You’d think that, we’ve been doing this four years, that maybe everybody that wanted to do it joined in the first year, and the truth is, our last year, we’ve grown the fastest rate so far. I think we can only attribute that to people continuously coming around to accepting a new way of doing things.
Lisa: You also make it very easy. The way that you are doing this, I don’t think that it could be easier. People just put the stuff in the bucket, the bucket goes out to the curb. You already have to do it with your trash. It’s not even that expensive, because I’ve looked into this, and it’s almost worth not having my own compost pile. Of course, then I’d miss the morning trips out there, so I probably won’t ever do Garbage to Garden, but it’s only because of my own spiritual need I guess to commune with the compost. This seems, at least from a consumer standpoint, it seems seamless.
Tyler: Yes. That was my intention from the beginning was how can we make this as simple, as convenient as possible. I don’t know. If someone has any idea, then I’m always looking for that information. You put it out there and it just magically turns into a fresh, clean bucket and a bag of finished product. It takes a year to turn that food scraps into good compost, but you set it out, a couple hours later, bam. Everything’s magically as it should be.
We also find ourselves answering a lot of questions, not just about what can compost and what can go in the bucket and how we can break down meat and how things that aren’t organically grown can make compost that’s good for growing organic food, and we answer questions about how to use this finished product, how to cut it with topsoil, how to use it for planting. We do a lot of compost deliveries. We’re installing raised beds for people this year, so we’ve really kind of branched out into educating people in a lot of ways and kind of participating at all levels of the loop of the life of food scraps.
Lisa: Food scraps have become a big issue.
Tyler: Yes. It’s 40% of what we throw away is biodegradable, and nationally, 3% of that material is composted, so 97% nationally is actually going to landfill. There’s a few issues with that. I like to think of composting as the most important issue of sustainability because it’s got three pillars to it. One is obviously waste reduction. Forty percent of what we throw away is the largest single component of municipal garbage, but also when food scraps break down in a landfill, there’s no oxygen, and in that environment they release the most methane and carbon dioxide, and methane is 20 to 30 times stronger than C02 as a greenhouse gas, so it all adds up that food waste in landfills is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, so if you’re cutting that back, you’re reducing that in a major way.
The third pillar is our whole food system is somewhat unsustainable. It’s based on importing a lot of chemical fertilizers. You’re just sowing the ground with liquid nitrogen and NPK. I don’t know exactly what they do, but I know that they’re not putting the actual organic material back in the soil. They’re just adding the liquid fertilizers, and over time, you’re pulling the organic matter out, and that’s what holds all the water in the soil, so that’s why soils get harder and dryer and require more fertilizing to be able to produce the same amount of food. It’s just sort of a long-term path to being able to produce less food and having a less productive soil if we don’t return those nutrients. There is a carbon cycle, and there needs to be a cycle in order for it to work for thousands of years. [inaudible 00:19:25] about the importance of it. I just think that it is the most important issue of sustainability in our time.
Lisa: They’re doing this at an international level, as well. They’re thinking about food waste on an international level.
Tyler: Yes. I get kind of focused in on what we’re doing here on the ground, but you hear about it from all directions. There’s a documentary out there, Just Eat It, that I just saw recently. It’s about people that survived growing all around the country. I think it was some amount of time, like a month or several months, that they ate nothing but food from dumpsters that was being thrown away that was totally good, and it was trying to educate you that sell by dates are not when food goes bad. That’s just something that is on there that doesn’t necessarily mean the food’s bad. You’ve got to use your senses to determine if something’s good to eat or not. I think something like one third of the food that’s produced on the planet goes to waste before it ever is potentially consumed by someone, so there’s more to the issue than just what to do with food that’s wasted, but how can we cut back on the waste of food. Have a little bin in your fridge that is an “Eat Me First” bin and put things there that are going to go bad.
I think that once people start separating their food scraps and putting them in a different bin, you see how much you do waste. You know that that’s money. People start to find ways to reduce the amount they’re throwing away and find ways to actually eat it before it gets to that point. I hope that we’re helping to encourage that change. Internationally, I think it’s like the UN’s theme for the year was food waste reduction. I don’t know much about their initiative, to tell you the truth, but I do know that I mentioned that 3% of the food scraps nationwide are composted, in Maine, I’m proud to say that’s extremely different. In Portland, it’s about 25% thanks to us, and now even other companies that have come in to help get that stuff out of the waste stream.
Lisa: You work with local farms. I’m just kind of curious. Is there a giant compost pile somewhere that you’re constantly turning and moving?
Tyler: There’s a few of them. Our first farm we worked with is Benson Farm in Gorham, and that’s still where a lot of material goes. That’s a huge compost pile. They have wind rows, which is just another fancy word for a long pile, that are probably 15 feet tall and 15 feet wide and 200 feet long, and there’s just dozens of them, and they get turned periodically. Nature does all the hard work. All you really do is monitor piles, make sure you’ve got the right balance of carbon and nitrogen material, and turn it when the temperature starts to drop. It might mean that it’s not getting enough air. It’s an enormous pile, and that’s actually the reason we can accept meat and dairy and bones and paper towels, stuff you can’t really do in your backyard, just because when it gets that big, the bacteria that live in that pile heat it up to higher temperatures and then new bacteria, thermophilic bacteria, will come in and can break down more complex proteins.
Actually, when I was at the farm once recently … Well, I guess it might have been a little while ago, but there was a whale that had been found on the beach. I want to say maybe it was a beluga whale, but they put that whale in a compost pile, give it a month or two, go back, open it up when the flesh is degraded but not the bones, then can exhume the bones for students, so that was pretty cool.
We are diverting 50 tons per week now of food scraps, and so we need more than one outlet. We’re proud to support local farms, but also we work with an anaerobic digester up in Exeter, Maine that makes electricity from food scraps, so a good several tons every day go up there. That’s pretty neat because it’s far away, but they are making energy from it, and they’re still getting a fertilizer product out of it. The energy is produced by burning the methane, but you can also condense that and make a renewable bio gas that is basically the same thing as natural gas, and so one day we hope to be able to power any gasoline vehicle you can convert to run on natural gas, so we can run our fleet on bio gas one day and basically have zero footprint in terms of fuel that we’re using, so the future’s pretty cool I think in this industry.
Lisa: How many households do you currently have?
Tyler: We’ve broken 5,000, so it’s quite a few, and then we’ve got 150 probably commercial locations that we compost with.
Lisa: What’s your goal? What would you like to see happen?
Tyler: Well, when I started out I had a goal of 5,000 households just as an arbitrary, “That would be a lot,” kind of number. The goal is to get all the food scraps out of the landfill, and how far do we extend that. Certainly, I consider southern Maine as our target area right now, but we think we have a program that’s successful enough that we can replicate that in other urban areas. We’re aiming to do that very soon, actually, in Massachusetts. Vermont and Mass and Connecticut and soon Maine all have organic waste bands, landfill bands, so they’re phased in and they start with just large generators that make one ton or more per week, and they say that you have to send it to a composting facility or an anaerobic digester. That’s going to step down closer and closer to the household level, and so it’s sort of making the market in those areas, and a lot of towns and businesses are really struggling to figure out how they’re going to comply with this, and really they need us down there. We’re going to be trying to replicate our model.
I mentioned James, who I started the web development company with that I grew up with. He’s on our team now, and he’s built a proprietary software that manages our whole operation, so soon drivers will actually just be able to use tablets in the trucks to complete the route, and everything’s just managed all live and very seamless, and it will also enable us to communicate with trucks in other states so that we can start these satellite operations and still have our home office here in Portland. That’s where we’re trying to go with it.
Lisa: Who would have ever thought that garbage could be so glamorous?
Tyler: Yes.
Lisa: That’s good stuff, actually. How do people find out about Garbage to Garden?
Tyler: How do they find out about it? Well, there’s a lot of information on our web site, GarbageToGarden.org. We’re at 57 Industrial Way in Portland. It’s a pretty cool area. They call it Industry Ale Way, because that’s where all the breweries are. People can come by for a tour and visit with us and stop and have a beer somewhere afterwards if they like.
Lisa: I’m really interested in what happens in the future of Garbage to Garden. I’m kind of fascinated by all this. It does my heart good knowing all these years I had to fight with people to talk about the importance of composting, even people of my own households, like, “Composting is so important.” It makes me feel happy that I’m now along with 5,000 other households that are at least participating in your program, and I’m sure countless other people who are doing their own composting. I’m so glad it’s become a thing. I know that our audio producer, Spencer, he’s a big fan of composting. We’re all on your side, Tyler. I give you a lot of credit for hanging in there and finding something that really works and making it a really practical solution.
Tyler: Yes. I mentioned we’re branching into other areas. This summer, we’re doing all kinds of events. Events are very wasteful, and that’s not just food, but all kinds of waste, so we partner with event planners to provide a zero waste event service and try to incentivize the food trucks and things coming in to use recyclable and compostable materials, and we make compost and recycle stations available all over and just try to make it as close to a zero waste event as possible with volunteers and such. You’re going to see us at these concerts and Fourth of July and different places. As much as possible, we want to connect with the communities that we’re in to help foster that social change.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Tyler Frank, who is one of the originators of Garbage to Garden. He’s the founder. I’m excited to hear about what’s going on. I probably should be less excited about composting because it doesn’t seem that exciting, but I am. I love what you’re doing. I’m really appreciative that you came in and you talked to us about this today.
Tyler: Yes. Well, I’m really glad to be here, and I’d love to be back sometime.
Lisa: Absolutely.