Door-to-door food-scrap service is picking up

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Erlene Howard, owner of Collective Resource Inc., uses these buckets to pick up food scraps. The company is a door-to-door food-scrap pickup service. | Buzz Orr~Sun-Times Media

Decision to Compost
begins with A small step

Mary Beth Schaye’s first awareness was how much food she wasted when she fed her family rotisserie chickens. Before she began composting, she had no idea how much of the chicken her family wasn’t eating. She decided to stop buying them because, “It was taking up a lot of real estate in my bucket!” she said.

Customer Michael Drennan is busy, but because of Collective Resource, he said he has been able to inspire a handful of his neighbors to begin composting, too.

“I live in a condominium building, and my time is of the essence. So they save me the time of developing my own compost and more importantly having to coordinate the composting with my neighbors,” said Drennan.

Drennan’s participation in Collective Resource’s composting program has made a noticeable difference in the amount of garbage he puts in his condo dumpster.

“It cuts the amount of garbage we put in the Dumpsters by about 50 percent, so that recycling has made, at least for myself and a few neighbors, a big difference in the amount of garbage we carry out,” he said.

And Drennan is more aware of the positive environmental impact he makes with his decision to compost. “There’s a lot of energy we throw away every day in the form of leftover food scraps that could be used for sustainable uses, and we’re cutting down on the amount traveling to the landfill,” he said. “There’s only so much landfill left.”

That gets to the heart of the matter of what Howard and Schaye are trying to accomplish with Collective Resource.

“Compost pretty much happens given the right opportunity…the planet knows how to take care of itself, we’re just the ones screwing it up,” said Howard. “We have the opportunity to not screw it up, too.”

Schaye believes that some degree of composting is something that “everyone and anyone can do,” she said, “and something is better than nothing.”

Schaye also said it is helpful to think of the three Rs of the environment – reduce, reuse, recycle – as a hierarchy. “The most important thing to do is reduce,” she said.

And the old adage of caring for the planet for the sake of the next generation became a real concern for her after she had children.

“You don’t want to cause so much trouble that they can’t fix it,” she said.

— Jenn Kloc

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Updated: January 23, 2012 8:07AM

Two Evanston women have pulled a business from the trash. By changing the definition of garbage, Collective Resource Inc. diverts compostable food scraps from the landfill and sustainably replenishes the earth by the bright orange bucketful.

Collective Resource Inc. operates in Evanston, Skokie, Wilmette and Chicago’s North Side. The company provides five-gallon buckets for people to collect food scraps in their homes, schools, businesses and places of worship.

Erlene Howard, founder and business owner, and Mary Beth Schaye, zero waste event coordinator, schedule a time to collect the buckets and deliver them to Land and Lakes, a local commercial composting center. For a fee, people can arrange to have the buckets collected weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.

“It started with my food journey, and my food journey started with my spiritual journey,” said Howard.

“It was kind of handed to me by the universe as like, here’s your mission.”

As part of her food journey, she became interested in raw food preparation, and in exploring this interest she learned about composting.

“(I thought) people would do this if there was an easy way to do this … and that’s when I went about trying to figure it out,” said Howard.

When things fell into place in October 2009, she decided to turn her passion for composting into a sustainable, local business.

“I realized that I had all of this beautiful resource that I was wasting by throwing it in the landfill. I am enough of an entrepreneur that I thought that I can help people do this better, and it could sustain me, and it could sustain the planet.”

Schaye, who came to Collective Resource first as a customer on the Green Committee at Dewey Elementary School, realized that her energy and interest in sustainable event planning could help others to reduce or eliminate waste at their own events.

“Our school wanted to green our events, and we didn’t know exactly how that was going to be,” said Schaye. “Somebody said compostable products, and I thought, ‘Where are we going to compost these things?’”

Schaye called the Evanston Ecology Center and learned about Howard’s composting services. She arranged to compost Dewey School’s first community event and continued working with Collective Resource throughout the rest of the school year.

“We tried to make it work for any time somebody was eating,” Schaye said.

Then, in April 2011, on Earth Day, “We decided that our passion and our mission needed each other,” said Howard.

“I really wanted to help people have zero waste events, and the way to have zero waste events is to be able to haul away your food scraps,” said Schaye. “So Collective Resource and that part of it is integral to the process.”

Schaye also enjoys zero waste events because they don’t weigh on her conscience as an enthusiastic party-planner.

“I love parties, I love gatherings, and I think that sometimes people feel guilty about the amount of garbage they’re creating when they have a party, and I wanted it to be all good, you know,” Schaye said. “I want it to be all a positive experience.”

Now, Collective Resource has about 70 customers, Howard said, including residences, businesses and churches. She said the split is about 60 percent suburban customers and 40 percent in Chicago, with more families concentrated in the suburbs and more business clients in the city.

Evanston businesses Jacky’s on Prairie, Campagnola Restaurant and the Unicorn Café are Collective Resource’s only suburban business partners currently, but the pair is looking to increase its customer base residentially as well as commercially.

“I think it’s going to get where more and more people can do it. It’s going to get more reasonable, you know, the more people that do it with us,” said Howard.

Howard also said she believes her business will expand locally. “I think it will get more local, and I think it will get more concentrated,” she said.

“It’s a little more spread out than I would like it to be in some ways,” she said. “If I had just as many customers in a three-block place, you know a three-mile place, then that would be fantastic. But I really do want to work with people who want to do it.”

That’s how they ended up hauling compost for the Academy for Global Citizenship at 47th Street and Cicero Avenue in Chicago.

“I have 250 kindergartners through fourth-graders who want to compost, so how could I say no?” said Howard.

Education is a key component of Collective Resource’s business plan. Schaye calls it “seed planting.”

Whether seed planting means offering zero waste event information fliers to the block party coordinator in Evanston, mentioning zero waste events to friends who are planning parties, or teaching kids about the importance of composting in elementary schools, Howard and Schaye are on top of it.

“When you landfill food, it creates methane, and when you compost food it does not create methane at all,” said Howard.

Methane is a greenhouse gas, said Schaye, which means it adds to global warming. But if we can reduce methane emissions, “Its life in the atmosphere is 12 years, which is a pretty short time,” she said.

“Twelve years is how many years kids are in school,” said Schaye. “(If) they divert food scraps as a kindergartener, then by the time they graduate from high school, if we have lots of schools doing this, we can improve the situation, the environmental situation.”

Lessons on composting aren’t just for children, Howard and Schaye believe. Anyone can learn about the benefits of composting.

“My business card reads ‘compost education and business services’ because people need to understand why it’s important,” said Howard. “I had a conversation one day with an electrical engineer who had no idea that food scraps turned into fertilizer, and just to watch the light bulb go off … it’s just so far removed from our city experience.”

When Collective Resource comes across a potential customer that is too big of a haul for the recently purchased 2008 Dodge Sprinter cargo van, Howard said she refers the customer to her composting mentor Ken Dunn. Dunn is the founder and director of the nonprofit Resource Center, which works with big clients in Chicago to involve businesses and offices in commercial composting.

Commercial composting is different from composting that people do at home. Howard, Schaye and Dunn all deliver the compostable food scraps collected in their businesses to Land and Lakes, which was the first center to receive a food waste recycling permit from the city of Chicago in December of 2009.

Land and Lakes implements an “aerated windrow composting process” in which they mix food scraps with yard waste to create a rich, fertilized soil they can sell to landscapers and gardeners, according to their website.

So beyond the environmental benefits associated with reduced methane emissions, composting also helps nourish parks, homes and gardens.

Independent in-home composting can be challenging, which is part of the reason Howard started Collective Resource in the first place.

Bokashi composting, which uses effective microorganisms to break down food waste, worm composting, which uses worms to break down and digest food waste into nutrient-rich compost, and backyard composting, which uses natural outdoor elements and insulated heating to transform scraps into compost are all popular ways that people can compost at home, but they require time and attention.

“If you’re trying to maintain a worm bin, you have to feed your worms twice a week,” said Howard. “They’re like pets. So If you go on vacation, you can’t just cancel your worm service for two weeks…you’ve got to get somebody to take care of your worms.”

Likewise, back yard composters in the Midwest may find it difficult to keep their heaps breaking down during the winter months. With these obstacles in the way, “The likelihood of it going into the garbage bag creeps back in,” said Howard.

“Once you get into the habit of separating out all of your food scraps for commercial composting…it’s a very easy habit to continue to do,” she said. “And people get a lot of different awarenesses from actually seeing it in the five-gallon bucket.”