NEWS
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Beckett Putney empties household food scraps into a Dumpster at Impact Earth, a residential food scrap collector in Monroe County. PHOTOS BY MAX SCHULTE
Wasted Potential
Composting is growing, but we’re a long way from getting with the program BY JEREMY MOULE
A
@JFMOULE
n earthy, musty smell hangs in the air of Impact Earth’s cavernous headquarters on Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road, where crews are emptying buckets of vegetable peels, apple cores, coffee grounds, egg shells, and other food scraps into totes destined for small farms for composting into a top soillike material. Roughly 20 tons of food scraps pass through the facility each week, 6 CITY
FEBRUARY 2021
JMOULE@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
according to the company, organic waste collected from residential customers and commercial clients, such as restaurants and institutional kitchens, that would otherwise sit in a landfill. “Everyone has food waste to varying degrees and rather than throw it in the trash bucket and have that go to the landfill, which we know is a bad thing, diverting it and having it turned into soil or energy is a much
better alternative,” said Robert Putney, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Impact Earth. Impact Earth became Monroe County’s only residential food waste composting service in January after it acquired its competitor, Community
Composting, for an undisclosed price. But the merger is more significant than a couple of companies consolidating. It is the latest sign that there is growing interest in and demand for composting in the Rochester region.
