15 Years, 15,000+ Tons and 150+ Co-Op Owners
15 Years
June 10, 2025 marked our 15th birthday! We’ve always described these milestones as birthdays, not anniversaries. Birthday seems more fun, but maybe anniversary feels a little more accurate because we’re doing this work in concert with our community. 15 years of helping our community combat climate change by making composting easy. We’re thinking back to our beginnings and revisiting our gratitude to Ken Dunn, the founder of the Resource Center and City Farm. It didn’t make sense for our founder Erlene to drive all the way to the commercial composting facility with the food scraps from a handful of customers. While she was getting her systems in place, Ken let her combine the food scraps from her short customer list to the food scraps at City Farm. Ken’s spirit of cooperation and collaboration set us on a path to help other haulers in need. Last year, when we learned that he had died, we published this blogpost.
15,000+ Tons
If you’ve been composting with us for a while, you’ve received one or several of our New Year’s emails, in which we report the number of tons we’ve diverted both that year and in all of our years combined. It took us six months to divert our first ton but these days, we routinely divert eight tons a day. We reached 15,000 tons in March 2025 and we’ve diverted 540 more since then. 15,540 tons! From the get-go, it‘s been difficult to illustrate tons in a way that people could understand. Some of you may remember that we used to use elephants to illustrate tonnage, always noting that we have never knowingly composted any actual elephants. Pounds are a bit easier to relate to. Remembering that one ton equals 2000 pounds, our grand total to-date, from our first swapout to our 15th birthday is— wait for it—31,080,000 pounds! Thirty-one million and eighty-thousand pounds! Wow!
150+ Co-Op Owners
You may have heard that we became a co-op in 2023. (Meant to be funny haha because we talk about it, kind of a lot.) It’s been so great! It has enabled so many of our customers to become more involved in ensuring our success and has helped us to feel more supported by our community. Isn’t that what it’s all about? Feeling like you’re a part of something?
