Each month, we will highlight community heroes that are making a difference in their communities and working to make their local environments cleaner and healthier.
This month, we are taking a look at Compost Junction in CO!
Compost Junction is a residential curbside food waste pick up service that makes food waste diversion easy and accessible for local residents. Founded to address the lack of food scrap composting options in Grand Junction, Compost Junction provides convenient collection services that keep organic waste out of landfills and return nutrient-rich compost back to the community, creating a true closed-loop system. The Biobag team connected with Jamie MacKillop, Owner/Founder of Compost Junction, to learn more about the organization's journey and impact.
What led you to start your composting operation?
After 8 years as a software engineer, I left the industry to figure out what I actually wanted to do. I'd previously lived on a farm in Hawaii, composting weeds and chicken manure into soil amendments. I was leaning toward getting back into farming when I heard Grand Junction's food waste diversion pilot program was about to get shut down, and that pulled me toward keeping the effort alive instead. The composting community turned out to be incredibly generous with their knowledge as I got started. I took some courses through the Business Incubator Center to build a real business plan, self-funded everything — the van, the buckets, the bags, the website — and got going a little over a year ago.
Who do you serve and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?
We serve residential customers in Grand Junction and Fruita (with Palisade coming as demand builds), plus a handful of commercial accounts like Trail Life Brewing and the Community Food Bank of Grand Junction. Folks can sign up and learn more at compostjunction.com, or reach us directly at [email protected].
How much organic material do you typically take in on a weekly basis?
It keeps growing every week (especially in the summer when there are a ton of melons in the buckets), but we're averaging around 1,500 pounds a week in diverted food waste.
Feel free to add any additional information about your operation as you see fit.
Compost Junction is a one-person operation (just me!), running weekly and biweekly pickup routes by van. We accept all food waste, including feedstock that shouldn't go in a backyard compost pile — meat, bones, fruit pits, and the like. We can take these because everything we collect goes to Delta Compost, a Class III facility (the highest state classification for a compost processor), which is equipped to handle a much wider range of material. Also, subscribers get finished compost delivered back to them twice a year, so it's a full loop, not just a pickup service.
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