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Home My WebLink About08-05-19 Public Comment - R. Green and A. Huckabone (with Happy Trash Can Curbside Composting) - City's Composting PlansFrom:Chris Mehl To:Agenda Subject:FW: Letter to Bozeman City Commission Date:Monday, August 05, 2019 2:28:05 PM Attachments:HTC letter to Bozeman City 8_1_19.pdf Comments on composting from local company. Chris Mehl Bozeman Deputy Mayor cmehl@bozeman.net 406.581.4992 ________________________________________ From: Happy Trash Can [happytrashcancompost@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, August 05, 2019 2:08 PM To: Chris Mehl Subject: Letter to Bozeman City Commission Hi Chris, Thank you again for your assistance in forwarding our letter to the city commissioners. Sorry for the longer time frame than we originally thought on getting it to you. Just to confirm: the August 19th meeting is when this will be addressed? Our best, Ryan & Adrienne -- happytrashcan.net<http://happytrashcan.net> 406-570-0896 info@happytrashcan.net<mailto:info@happytrashcan.net> :) August 1st, 2019 Happy Trash Can Curbside Composting 1009 South Black Ave Bozeman, MT 59715 Bozeman City Commission 121 N. Rouse Avenue Bozeman, MT 59715 Dear City Commissioners of Bozeman, We are a local family business that works with food waste and compost collection, called Happy Trash Can Curbside Composting. We are writing you this letter today for you to learn about who we are, and hear our thoughts and concerns regarding the city’s future composting plans as you also read your rate study. We understand the importance of compost, and believe that our hometown of Bozeman should consider utilizing the private sector as much as possible in conjunction with a municipal program. While we do not know the details of the city’s plans, we hope to bring to light how our small business would be affected by a government run program, and how we would like to collaborate however possible to keep our business in the community. In this letter you will see: who we are, who we work with, what we do and what our mission is, and how we propose we can expand our business to work in conjunction with the city’s potential program. Happy Trash Can Curbside Composting (happytrashcan.net) was founded in 2016 with the mission of diverting food waste from the landfill, educating our community on the composting process, and creating a healthy soil amendment to be used by local farmers and gardeners. In the past three years, we have diverted about 800,000 pounds of food waste from the Logan Landfill and instead have created healthy compost. We have helped push the conversation forward about composting and its importance in our community and work with clients such as: Rosauers Supermarket, The Bozeman Food Co-op, Ale Works, Wild Joes, West Paw, local schools, preschools and residential customers all over Gallatin Valley. We also donate our time and services to engage our community on a one on one basis by providing composting pick up and education at the Bogert, Bozeman Winter and Livingston Farmers Markets and with our annual free “Pumpkin Smash” event, held at the Emerson. We offer a year round service with convenient curbside pick up. We accept all food waste: meat, dairy, vegetable scraps (raw and cooked), compostable paper products (napkins, pizza boxes, etc.) all compostable service wares and yard waste (non treated with herbicides or pesticides). We process this collected material by mixing it with carbonaceous material (wood chips and sawdust delivered to our compost yard by local arborist and carpenters) and then placing it into our Gore™ Cover ASP system provided by Sustainable Generation. This patented technology allows us to hit benchmark temperatures to kill pathogens while we process material, as found in meat and dairy. It also acts as a container for all the material while it's in it's most volatile state, and at the same time keeps it free from unwanted pests. It also greatly expedites the composting process, allowing us to process material in an 8 to 10 week time period. We bring outside expertise and support with us to the city of Bozeman. Ryan Green (owner and Chief Composting Officer) worked for the Department of Sanitation New York’s NYC Compost project as an Organics Outreach Coordinator. His work included: collecting food waste, processing it, outreach, education and finally assisting in the roll out a curbside program in Manhattan, which was proven successful and has now been adopted city wide. He has also managed organic farms in Maine and Bozeman, so he understands the importance of capturing food waste (separate from treated yard waste) to utilize as a high value input in creating healthy compost. Adrienne Huckabone (owner and Chief Marketing Officer) is a Bozeman native who moved us back to her hometown to help move it in a more sustainable direction. She has worked in marketing all over the country and is responsible for all graphic design and educational content that we distribute. She has taken her years of experience in design to create informative campaigns, infographics and take away literature to help properly educate the public on source separation and composting. Happy Trash Can has also developed a working relationship with Sustainable Generation (https://sustainable-generation.com/), the company that provides our state of the art composting technologies. SG is owned by Scott Woods, a fellow Montanan and MSU Alum, who is dedicated to helping us push composting forward in our community and by helping us grow to fit the community's needs. We have grown our business over the past three years and are thankful for the support that this community has shown us. With that being said we are concerned with the City of Bozeman: Solid Waste Division’s plan to expand its organics pick ups into food waste. Our main concern is that we would not be able to compete with such a large entity that will be able to drive down the cost of pick ups. We understand that “this is the nature of business” but feel that the city (Solid Waste Division) would be hurting an established small business by doing so, when they should instead be creating opportunities to work together. Half of our gross income comes from our residential clients and if the city’s service took even a fraction of those away we fear we would have to potentially close shop. In addition to the potential risk of affecting our business by taking away customers, we also have concerns regarding the city’s approach to handling organic waste. Currently, the city offers yard waste collection starting in May and ending in September with no focus on food waste. From our understanding the city would be adding the additional acceptance of food waste to allow for the purchase of a new compactor truck that would allow for the automation of the route to a one person job. While looking at this proposed collection process several potential concerns arise: ●Contamination of the compost stream: mixing food waste with potentially treated yard waste will yield an end product that should not be used for growing food. ●Part-year service: this could give the wrong impression that composting and diverting organic waste from the landfill is a seasonal activity, when in fact it's important to do year round composting. Part Year composting would significantly lessen the amount of food scraps saved. Our business would not be financially able to survive to fill in the off season months for the city and customers would likely stop collecting table scraps during the city collection off season. We understand that the city is trying to divert as much waste as possible but ultimately could hurt the growing private sector that is already doing this and has invested time and equity in our community. We do not think that we are the “end all be all” of compost in Bozeman. There are other small businesses that run similar programs that would also be negatively affected by the city’s proposal. With composting being a rather new concept on the radar of the larger population it seems that education and proper communication around composting is important and something that the private sector has been successfully performing. There are many options that exist for the private sector and the city to work together on this important and ever present issue. We hope that the city can take into consideration our concerns and see the value in the work we have done in the past three years and what we have built. We would be happy to have any city workers or elected officials tour our site to see first hand how we are already tackling this process. We have the ability to scale up quickly, with the potential to help the city tackle this problem in our community. ●The city could contract our business as an outreach sector. We would expand on our current work with public outreach and host community events, create drop off sites, educational events, school workshops, tabling etc. ●The city could work with us as a drop off site to manage non-contaminated materials to help grow our mission of providing good compost product to the community. This would allow for both operations to tackle organics diversion while allowing for a multitude of finished products to be used in our community (compost for erosion control, compost for vegetable productions, compost teas, etc.) ●Our operation should be used in conjunction with city for local to statewide soil amendment growth and soil restoration ●We could become a division within the solid waste program, or our business could be restructured in such a way that we could work for or consult the city program. We thank you for your time in reading this letter and consideration on this matter. Please feel free to reach out to us directly to set up a tour, meeting or share any thoughts you might have. Sincerely, Ryan Green & Adrienne Huckabone Owners - Operators Happy Trash Can Curbside Composting