Meet Encinitas's New Food Scrap Recyclers
The Compost Group is on its way to creating the farm-to-fork-to-farm movement for our restaurants in Encinitas. The team has created an urban-friendly way of composting restaurant food waste in a way that is easy and affordable for everyone.
How The Compost Group Helps Local Restaurants
- The company supplies the 48-gallon rolling waste bin and gives restaurants options for how they want to separate organics best for their operations.
- They replace the bins with freshly cleaned new ones at a frequency needed (weekly to daily), all before the lunch rush.
- The team takes the food scraps back to the composting site in San Marcos and carefully composts it into a living soil product which can be used by farmers or gardeners interested in regenerative farming.
The goal is to make doing good for the environment easy on businesses, just ask the company’s current participating restaurants: GOODONYA, Las Olas, and Nectarine Grove.
While The CompostGroup just became operational right before COVID struck, they are still optimistic that they will be composting on a larger scale soon enough. The team is in it for the long haul as a local, women-owned, small business looking to change the game in Waste Management.
Why Compost?
Composting is one of the best things we can do for the environment. Not only does the act of diverting our food waste from the landfill eliminate some seriously potent methane emissions, but applying the finished compost to land can completely revive depleted soils. Having a healthy, living soil enables plants to feed on trace minerals, creating healthier and tastier food and also ensures carbon is sequestered from the atmosphere and into the soil.
Large Waste Haulers vs. The Compost Group
While the large waste haulers are coming down the line with expensive organic waste hauling programs, the founder of The Compost Group, Naomi Wentworth, views these regional solutions to be another problem for the environment. The larger haulers, including EDCO, will be hauling food scraps to their regional anaerobic digestion facility where they create a methane off-gassing sludge to power their vehicles. The sludge is then pasteurized to create sterile, high-nitrogen pellets that act as chemical fertilizers when applied to the land which contaminates our waterways, pollutes our air, and creates a low-nutrient, synthetic environment to grow our food. The Compost Group wants to prove that high volumes of food waste could still be processed in a way that creates a high-quality, living soil product that can bring life and health back into our soil.
Drop Off in San Marcos: $15/month
Residential Pickup throughout Encinitas:
$15 bucket starter kit plus:
$30/month for weekly pickup
$16/month for every-other-week pickup
$10/month for once per month pickup
The Compost Group has increased sanitation practices by wiping off cart handles for a final time at each restaurant / residential drop-off, and monitoring all employee's. Additionally, all hauling vehicles have hand sanitizer in them, and drivers sanitize their hands between each pickup and wear a mask accordingly.
Join The Movement
The Compost Group recently expanded into picking up residential compost buckets since so many of our meals shifted to the home, and offer free delivery of their compost toEncinitas customers. So whether you are interested in getting your business, restaurant, or home composting, or if you want to purchase some living soil, learn more on The Compost Group’s website by clicking HERE!