Turning greens into garden gold

Turning greensinto garden gold

Compost Winnipeg sees business opportunity in organic waste.

Winnipeg residents could

make much better use of their leftovers, Kelly Kuryk thinks.

Unlike many Canadian communities that put their kitchen scraps into green bins, people who live in Winnipeg send most of their organic waste to the dump with garbage.

At the same time, much of the compost sold to gardeners in Manitoba’s capital is imported from British Columbia, Quebec and the US.

That’s a situation Kuryk, project

Compost courier Tyrell Benton and Compost Winnipeg project manager Kelly Kuryk with bins and machinery

Photos by John Longhurst

manager for Compost Winnipeg, would like to change. “We’re missing a huge part of the equation,” she says. “All of the resources that just go into the landfill every day. It’s pretty heartbreaking.”

Compost Winnipeg was launched on Earth Day (April 22) 2016, after developing a business plan and consultations with clients. This lean start-up grew out of Winnipeg’s Green Action Centre (GAC).

Originally the Recycling Council of Manitoba, the GAC pioneered Winnipeg’s

first recycling depots in the 1980s, collecting cardboard, pop cans and other high-value recyclables, prior to the advent of curbside pickup.

Kuryk joined the centre in 2014, when it had been looking at starting a social enterprise to further its mission and develop a new funding source. She was considering starting a small business collecting compost.

The centre hired her to do a feasibility study.

Her environmental science background included consulting forthe federal government, doing green building assessments, volunteering with CUSO in Chile, teaching about gardening and composting.

After completing a Master’s in Education, and having children, she wanted to start a small business. “I just wanted to grow something and have an impact.”

Results of the study were encouraging. “It looked pretty good at the time.”

She quickly realized the venture needed equipment and a lot of capital to get going. “The first year, we weren’t sure we were going to be able to make a go of it. We were trying to do everything, with little to no budget.”

Kuryk started a boutique service for offices but found she couldn’t get critical mass to expand in that market.

When a competitor went out of business, Compost Win-

Kelly Kuryk

nipeg took over their clients, including some larger commercial firms.

Next, Compost Winnipeg tested people’s appetite for curbside residential pickup. A day after a CBC Radio story about them, they had 100 clients signed up. “We couldn’t run all over the city picking up everywhere, so we focused on a few neighborhoods that were denser (with at least 15 clients).”

Fairly quickly they had a few hundred inquiries, but couldn’t service them all due to capacity.

She added a co-worker, rented a truck and continued to expand. Compost Winnipeg now has eight staff, with plans to hire several more. Its pickup fleet consists of three trucks and an electric bicycle with a cargo trailer that can be used about six months a year.

Kuryk is pleased Compost Winnipeg passed one million pounds of collected organic waste earlier this year and is now basically breaking even.

Their busiest day is Tuesday, when they do pickups at 140 residential and commercial sites, gathering 5,511 pounds (2.5 tonnes) of organic waste. “The people that are signing up with us are on the forefront of wanting to reduce their waste,” she said.

Residential customers pay $25 a month, get a five-gallon bucket to leave by their front door, and empty their waste into compostable bags that line the bucket.

After collecting biomass, staff put the material in the largest truck and drop it off at a commercial compost site. Currently they must pay the compost site to accept the material.

Given that most of the compost sold at garden centres is imported, Kuryk thinks there is a business opportunity in processing and selling cured compost.

Getting there isn’t as simple as building a pile and letting it rot. “You can’t just start dumping compost in a field and start a compost site.”

Compost Winnipeg plans to develop a state-of-the-art, commercial pilot composting site on the Canadian

Mennonite University (CMU) campus and join CMU’s Centre for Resilience incubator. Discussions for the $300,000 project started in early 2018. Between a third and half the needed funds have been committed. “We want it to be something that fits into the site, which is fairly urban, and is a place that people can visit,” Kuryk said.

James Magnus-Johnston, who heads up CMU’s Centre for Resilience (see story, pg. 18), is confident the effort will proceed. “This is a highly well-regarded project,’’ he said.

Compost Winnipeg is an ideal fit with the Centre for Resilience’s focus on social and ecological resilience, supporting businesses and practices that are restorative, he said.

“There are few ways that present as straightforward a model as composting,” making soil out of waste, he said.

He believes the project has business, educational and stewardship value, including reducing CMU’s waste.

Kuryk hopes university students, researchers and other school groups will be able to visit the “in vessel” composting site.

Backyard composting is usually cold composting. Unless people have a large amount of material, the pile will not generate the heat required to keep it active year-round.

Commercial sites can keep working in the coldest weather if the volumes, moisture and ingredient mix are done right. A healthy commercial site will reach over 131 degrees Fahrenheit (55 degrees Celsius), pasteurize the material and kill any pathogens, she said. “The microbes breaking down the material generate heat.”

There are several types of commercial composting systems. The in-vessel system planned for CMU rotates, driven by an electric motor. The system insulates and rotates the compost, allowing for control of moisture and smells.

After three to seven days of processing, the compost can be moved to bins. “The longer you can cure it, the better. Ideally, you produce it and let it sit one next year and sell it the next year.”

Compost Winnipeg will move its operations into the Centre for Resilience once the pilot starts. The project will include a 40 by 100-foot building plus adjacent space for compost curing pads. Solar panels on the building roof will generate power for the project, with support from Bullfrog Power, a Canadian green energy retailer.

Even once the CMU pilot site is up and running, some of the material Compost Winnipeg collects will still have to be sent to another site. Some commercial pickups are contaminated with garbage, recycling and coffee cups. “The larger the number of people there are, the more complicated it gets.”

Launch of the pilot may be another year away. More staff time is needed to speed up fundraising and development of a business plan for selling the finished product.

The pilot will create jobs, raise public awareness and provide a new revenue source for Compost Winnipeg. “Create a new job, help someone start a garden, it all sounds perfect to me.”

“I think there is an appetite (for a broader program for compost pickup),” she said. “People are showing us that by paying us.” ◆

17 The Marketplace July August 2019