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 Curbside Composter in WI!

Curbside Composter is a composting service based in Madison, WI. Derek's passion for composting started on the farm, and since then, he constantly strives to update his knowledge on the latest composting advances. Biobag Associate spoke to Derek Fry, owner of Curbside Composter, about the organization. Their interview is transcribed below.

What led you to start your composting operation?

Curbside Composter began with a worm farm present to my wife for our first year together in our apartment. While I  was studying soil science and being more conscious about our eating habits, we realized how many food scraps we were accumulating, we bought the vermicomposting bin to help us break down the scraps faster. When our worms couldn't keep up with our waste we realized this might be more of a larger issue, which then grew into multiple compost bins in the yard and a basement full of worm bins on shelves.

I started to compost a cafe in our backyard for free, then added two coffee shops at the community garden who we helped at the school Katie (my wife) taught at. That grew into our business! We started composting food waste at community gardens donating the compost to them. That grew quickly then we shifted to composting at local farms giving them the compost to enrich their soil when it's finished. That is where we are at today with two small garbage trucks and over 800 residential customers every week. We also compost for two schools for free, one my daughter started when she realized they were throwing their waste in the garbage.