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 Hillside Solutions in NE!
Hillside Solutions is an award-winning hauler who services the Omaha, Gretna, and Council Bluffs area in Nebraska. They take care of your landfill waste, recycling, and/or composting from your business, organization, or school. They have quite a story. What began as Gretna Sanitation, a family-owned residential trash pickup company, grew into a much larger mission. First, they launched Soil Dynamics, the first and only industrial composting facility in the Greater Omaha area. They then expanded with Hillside Solutions, focused on diverting valuable materials from landfills. Most recently, they established the Hillside Fund, which supports programs and educational initiatives that promote the benefits of composting and help schools, growers, individuals, and organizations access recycling and composting services they might not otherwise be able to afford. The Biobag team connected with Brent Crampton, Director of Marketing at Hillside Solutions, to learn more about the organization's journey and impact.
What led you to start your composting operation?
Honestly, the business case initially led the decision. You gotta imagine, we started as a son-and-pop operation from scratch. We offered typical trash and recycling pickup. Our competitors were some of the biggest in the world. They all had more trucks, better routes, way more resources, and they owned the landfills we paid to have our material dropped off at. How are you supposed to get a leg up in that situation? Open a landfill?
So one fall, we got fed up with paying the extra tipping fees to our competitors during yard waste season. We noticed one area that wasn’t being served in the Omaha area was composting. We thought, why don’t we keep the yard waste and make a product out of it? Instead of opening a landfill, we opened a composting facility, and everything changed after that. Now, we’re fully bought in. We're in the middle of launching a residential curbside composting service. We started a non-profit. And we were just given a US Composting Council award. So it’s exciting times over here.
Who do you serve and how can people get in touch with you if they want to start composting?
We’re focused on the Greater Omaha area with landfill, recycling, and composting services for homes and businesses. We do the hauling with Gretna Sanitation (gretnasanitation.com) and Hillside Solutions (https://www.hillside.solutions/). Then the compostable material is processed by Soil Dynamics (soil-dynamics.com) in Ashland, Nebraska.
We just started a non-profit, Hillside Fund (https://www.hillsidefund.org/), to help close the education gap around composting and help more farmers loosen their dependence on chemical fertilizers that are polluting Nebraska’s waters.
How much organic material do you typically take in on a weekly basis?
We take in roughly 900 tons of organic material per week — approximately 50,000 tons per year — from our combined residential, commercial composting streams, and tree debris. All of it goes to our Soil Dynamics facility in Ashland, Nebraska, where it's processed into nutrient-dense compost and soil products. Some of that finished product goes right back to our Compost Club members for their yards and gardens, and once a year, through our Compost Club Gives campaign, members vote to donate finished compost to nonprofit food gardens across Omaha.
Feel free to add any additional information about your operation as you see fit.
For above Annual Award Show, read more here!
The biggest thing happening at Hillside right now is Curbside Compost Club, Omaha's first-ever curbside composting pickup service, launched alongside Hillside Fund, our new non-profit.
For years, our Compost Club program has given Omaha households a way to compost through a network of 60+ drop-off locations across the metro. 1,800+ households signed up, and the number one piece of feedback we kept hearing was: "We love this — but can you just come pick it up?" So we launched it on Earth Day 2026. Two and a half months in, we're past 200 signups, and the average household is setting out 34.2 pounds of food scraps and yard waste per weekly pickup. We started with a tight boundary in Omaha's busiest neighborhoods and we've expanded it every month since, following where demand shows up.
Once we have that material, we decontaminate it at Soil Dynamics, grind and blend it, and send it to local farms as organic fertilizer. Nebraska has a problem with nitrates in the water. Much of that is due to the heavy use of chemical fertilizers in the area and we just wanna help farmers use less synthetic chemicals and use more organic fertilizer. With the long-term benefit of seeing less nitrates go into our water, hopefully, fewer people will die of cancer.
That farm-direct model shaped the program design. With that in mind, one caveat from our commercial composting service — we don't accept compostable serveware or bioplastics from our residential curbside customers. Simply because the material skips full industrial processing and doesn’t look so good sitting in someone’s farm field, but food scraps of every kind, meat, dairy, bones, plus unlimited yard waste are all in. We point every member to BPI-certified bags, with Biobag as the brand we recommend by name on our FAQ.
To bridge that gap with farmers, this is where our 501(c)(3) named Hillside Fund comes in. Going after grants, educating farmers and neighbors, and generally making composting more accessible to folks who can't afford it.
For any hauler considering curbside organics in your own market: run a drop-off program first so you launch with a warm audience, start with one small route boundary and grow it monthly, and get in front of your city officials early. If your city has a climate action plan, the good news is that you're helping them, not asking for a favor.
As we put the pieces of these programs together, one thing we've found is that the small-business-to-small-business composting industry is so welcoming and nurturing. Typically, companies in the same industry hoard their wisdom, but our experience hasn’t been like this with composters in other markets. Rust Belt Riders has jumped on a phone more than once, Black Earth Compost has so many great resources that we're inspired by, and the BPI composter committee has been a great catalyst for hearing the hard-earned lessons from others. Alongside the community composter program Biobag offers us, we're just thankful. We all get the mission and are willing to build each other up.
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