Crown Town Compost

Transcript:

Narrator
Welcome to The Best of LKN, a podcast featuring the best small businesses and the most influential professionals around Lake Norman, North Carolina. Each week, we spotlight those businesses and individuals that are making a positive impact here in the Lake Norman area. Thanks for joining us, enjoy the show.

Jeff
Welcome back to The Best of LKN. This is Lake Norman’s number one small business podcast where we work each and every day to elevate the Lake Norman small business community and introduce you to the best and brightest small business owners, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and leaders of local nonprofit organizations. I want to first as always give a shout out to our sponsors who make the work we do here at The Best of LKN possible. I encourage you to get to know these exceptional local small businesses by going to our homepage at thebestoflkn.com. There you’ll find a list of all of our platform sponsors with links to follow to learn more about their businesses. We’ll also have links to our sponsors in the show notes for this episode. While you’re on our homepage, go ahead and sign up for our free weekly email newsletter. It’s packed with links to all of our latest podcast episodes, blog articles, and our newest YouTube videos. We’re also including local upcoming events that we think might interest you. So hop on over to thebestoflkn.com after you listen to this episode, and sign up for our email newsletter. Check out our latest video on YouTube featuring our friends at Charlotte Running Company in Mooresville. The owner of the Lake Norman area Charlotte Running Company stores, Jamie Lewis joined us back in episode five of the podcast. Please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel, we need all the encouragement we can get over there. All right, in this episode, I sit down with the co-founder of Crown Town Compost, a Charlotte-based startup in the sustainability space that’s serving quite a few businesses and residents right here in the Lake Norman area. Crown Town Compost is making composting accessible, affordable, and convenient for customers throughout the Charlotte metro area that wants to reduce waste. David Valder joins me to share the story of his entrepreneurial journey and the inspiration behind the work he and the team are doing at Crown Town Compost. It’s a very sustainable Episode 111 of Lake Norman’s number one small business podcast. Thanks for joining us. Enjoy getting to know the co-founder of Crown Town Compost, David Valder.

Jeff
David, welcome to the podcast.

David
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Jeff
Yeah. Appreciate you being here. Crown Town Compost is an interesting concept. And I’ve been looking forward to featuring it on the podcast. What’s interesting is like you’re based in Charlotte, right?

David
Yeah.

Jeff
But you serve quite a few businesses here in the Lake Norman area. And some of them have been actually guests on this podcast that we’ve featured. So, I’ve been excited to bring you on and talk about the service that Crown Town Compost provides and the unique opportunities that you provide your customers for ways of disposing and so forth of materials. Before we get into the work that you and your team do at Crown Town Compost and what inspired the business in the first place, I’d love for you to share a little bit of your background with the listeners. A little bit of a bio on you, your education, career, prior careers, and then what inspired Crown Town Compost.

David
Absolutely. Yep. So, I was raised in Charlotte, went to Northwest School of the Arts for high school, super great school, ended up going to App State to study sustainable development. And I was getting close to graduating. And like every college student, realized that I had no idea, you know, what to do with this degree. I definitely thought, you know, nonprofit, government work, environmental education, something like that. And around May, you know, came close to graduation, a friend or I guess an acquaintance of mine, Kris Steele, who ended up becoming one of the co-founders of Crown Town Compost, reached out and said, you know, he said, I have an idea for business, give me a call. So, we connected again, it had been a couple years, and ended up being this idea of creating a compost service for people who want to compost, but don’t have time, space, the know how to do it, kind of making it easy. And it ended up being a concept that already existed elsewhere. We didn’t really know that. So, we felt pretty original. But there’s several companies around the country that we’re doing and now even more that do the same thing. So, we started hanging out, meeting again, talking about this concept and kind of got it off ground, you know, Googled how to form an LLC, that kind of stuff.

Jeff
Oh yeah.

David
And later that year, this was 2014, I did end up getting a quote unquote real job with Belk corporate office in Charlotte actually, as their sustainability coordinator, working for their sustainability director. So, it’s a team of two. So, took on that job while we still tried to build up Crown Town Compost as a startup business. And learned a lot there, kind of that there’s this whole world of corporate sustainability, which is a whole other kind of realm, but you know, it was kind of inspiring that I was able to take that kind of passion that I had for sustainability, study it in school, create a business out of it, and also, you know, have kind of a, begin to form a career from that. Fast forward to 2016, Belk was bought by a private equity firm, and they kind of cleaned house all across the board. And sustainability was one of those areas. So, on October 26th, I was laid off. And then I interviewed for another job that I had, the one that I have now outside of compost, on Halloween that year. So, I’m currently in that job, as the Director of Energy and Sustainability for Central Piedmont Community College.

Jeff
Oh, very cool.

David
Yeah. So that’s my, that’s the job that pays me. Crown Town Compost is not there yet. And I’m not an employee of Crown Town. But as one of the owners, I’m kind of building it up to become something real.

Jeff
I can certainly relate. Yeah, I have two enterprises. The first one I started 10 years ago, been pushing that one uphill, uphill by myself for a long time and went a long time without taking a paycheck. And a current media company, I can totally relate, like you, you know, there’s a lot of work that goes into preparing a business for a success, and it takes time, and you know, you eat a lot of ramen noodles and save a lot of money during that time wherever you can. My daughter would be envious. She wanted to go to Northwest School of the Arts, back when she was in high school. She’s out of college now. She graduated from Chapel Hill a couple of years ago, but a big fan of Northwest School of the Arts, and she had a lot of friends who went there. So yeah, really amazing school. Really amazing school. So, when did you, what year, was it 2016 that you kind of founded Crown Town Compost? Or when did that one really start to, when did you really start to make some headway with that company?

David
So, in terms of actually picking up people’s food waste from their houses, it was early 2015. So, in late 2014, we went to Queen City Ford, at the time, I don’t think they exist anymore, had a, they called it an unconference. Kind of like a summit of entrepreneurs who had ideas, and this one was food related. And so, we thought, well, we’re food waste related. So, we’ll go to that. Not really knowing what it was about, but we knew that it had, it was sort of a lead up to a pitch contest for like some small business funding. So, we decided to go to that. Another attendee at the unconference was Marcus Carson, who, at the time in 2014, was one of the sustainability coordinators for Davidson College, actually. So, he was there with some of their sustainability fellows. And it’s cool, because just a side note, we have Davidson College as one of our compost clients now. So, it’s kind of come full circle since then. And he, we basically became friends at this conference, and he jumped in with us to kind of become a co-founder at the time. And then he ended up doing that pitch contest for us because he was a much better speaker. And we came in third place, got a thousand bucks, ultimately used that to pay for a bike trailer. So, our initial concept in 2014, we’re thinking, alright, we’re gonna pick up food waste in little buckets, three-gallon, five-gallon buckets from homes. We’ll put it in the back of a bike trailer, bike around a neighborhood, drop it off of their community garden, go to the next neighborhood or will have bikes in different neighborhoods around the city. I think we just, we learned in the first year, two years, one from kind of growing slowly and two when we did grow, realizing that food waste is really heavy, that bikes weren’t going to be scalable. On that note of bikes, people really liked the bike idea. So, I feel bad, especially because we had like a news article at the time with our bike and people still find it these days. And we’re like, yeah, we have like three trucks now, but some of our peers around the state, actually one in Raleigh, Compost Now, they have piloted, I’m not sure if it was successful, kind of bringing back the bike, once they have that density, especially like in urban areas, just, you know, parking’s an issue, and I think they actually used like an electric cargo bike or trike, which is kind of cool. So, there’s potential for that in the future. But yes, 2014, long story short, was when we started.

Jeff
No, that’s cool. It’s funny you bring up Davidson College, we’re recording at Davidson College today. The Hurt Hub, The Jay Hurt Hub Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, where I meet with a lot of my guests to record these episodes. Very cool that you work with Davidson College. So, I love how we were able to tie that in. Share with the listeners, exactly what Crown Town Compost does for your customers? How do you serve these local restaurants? What material do you collect and what happens to it after you collect it?

David
So, Crown Town Compost, our kind of bread and butter is picking up food waste and making sure it gets composted for our clients. In terms of number of clients, we are majority residential customers. So, we’ve got about 800 residential clients and about 75 commercial clients, most of which are restaurants. But in terms of weight, if you look at, you know, how much food waste comes out of these customers, processes, restaurants, and other commercial clients, produce way more than 800 households.

Jeff
Sure.

David
So, it’s kind of, it’s interesting to see that balance. And as we grow to be strategic about how much time and resources does it take us to pick up a house producing seven pounds of food waste a week versus a restaurant producing 900 pounds of food waste a week. And I mean, we’re all about doing both, I think you have to because even though the impact from one house is relatively small, the owner of that house, the customer, the individual, they may own three restaurants, you know, their neighbor might own two restaurants. And so, changing that mindset at a community level, at grassroots level, is really important, not just for compost, but kind of when you look at any kind of behavior change, it’s important to have lots of touch points, not just those high impact clients.

Jeff
So, in terms of volume, like 75 restaurants probably produce more volume than the 800 residential customers. Would that be pretty accurate?

David
Yeah, totally accurate. It’s a lot, it’s a lot more. And it’s a lot easier, logistically to pick it up. So, to kind of illustrate how that looks, so for a typical restaurant, or a coffee shop, they’re going to have one to five 64 gallon rolling trash cans. Similar to what most people have at home, just little smaller. A lot of the home ones are like 96 gallons. And so, they fill that up, some of them just dump directly into the bins, maybe they use a five-gallon bucket to transport. Some of them use like Slim Jim trash cans with a special compostable trash bag. That way you can kind of tie it up and move it a little easier. But it’s, and I bring that up just from like a business expense perspective, each one of those bags is like 80 cents to a dollar. So, you start using 10 of those a day for trash can, you know, it’s one more reason why it’s hard for us to convince restaurants sometimes to do this, because most of the time it’s an added expense, and you know, we can kind of get into that, you know, why compost does or does not make sense for, or why it’s hard to convince people to do it sometimes in this region. And so, we just take that 64-gallon bin that’s full at the end of the week, or sometimes it’s multiple times a week if they’re busy and don’t have a lot of space, dump it into one of our commercial trucks. So basically, we have one that’s an F350 with a six-yard bed in the back of it that’s like a dumpster, and the whole dumpster tips. The reason we went with that model versus like a more garbage truck looking truck is compost is like, food waste is like 80% water, 20 to 80%, depends on what it is. And so, and if you’ve been behind a garbage truck and kind of see like, there’s like liquid in the back, it’s kind of gross, and we would have a lot more of that. So, we didn’t want it to be like dripping down the street. So, we have that one and we have a larger one that’s like a class five truck, the biggest you can get before you have to have a CDL. And so, commercial that’s kind of it. They fill the large bin up; we tip it out. We do have one or two offices where we’re actually coming into the office and like kind of like a custodial service, taking out the actual bag of compost from their kitchenette and taking it back to the truck. But we try to keep costs low by just being at that loading dock or dumpster area level. For residential, so apartments real quick, because it’s kind of easy to explain, we give them a three and a half gallon bucket, they fill it up, once a week we come and switch it out with a clean empty one. So, apartments especially, you know, there’s not a lot of room to have smell because neighbors will be mad and apartment managers, so we keep that super clean. Similarly, we have a drop off service, at least in Charlotte, potentially one coming up in Davidson, we’re working with the town on, where customers bring a full bucket and switch it out with an empty one. And we kind of have empty buckets ready all the time at dedicated spots. And then single family, which is our last model. Until 2019, we had done similar to apartments, just swishing buckets out. We’re finding though, that it was just becoming difficult to scale that quantity of bucket swaps and cleaning that many buckets all the time. And keep costs as low as we can. Because this is an optional service, right? People are choosing to do this because it’s the right thing to do. Or they want compost soil back, which we do that as well. And so, we do with residential single family now is we give them a 24-gallon bin that stays outside, or in their garage if they want to. And we only pick it up every two weeks. So, we were able to cut their driving portion in half. And then they keep a three-and-a-half-gallon bucket in their kitchen. And then they are responsible to clean it versus us cleaning it. We were a little worried like, there’d be some pushback and there were a few people because it’s a little more work a little more having to clean your own bucket. But really like I mean, at least so far, our customers are the type of customer who were okay with that. So, it remains to be seen, you know, we don’t really know is that cutting us off from other people who maybe don’t want to do as much work. But so far, so good.

Jeff
Yeah, they’re not necessarily doing it because of the convenience, right, they have other motivators for participating in the service. I love that idea of the center that you might be bringing to Davidson, it’s a great idea where they can just swap out at their convenience. Full buckets for clean buckets. That’s really, I love that idea. I look forward to staying in touch with you about that. Seeing if you’re able to make that happen. That’s a really good idea. It reminds me a little bit of Boomerang Water. Are you familiar with them? Boomerang Water Company is a company that I featured here on the podcast early on in our production and they’re actually based here in Davidson, as a matter of fact, they just moved their headquarters to this building, they’re neighbors here at The Hurt Hub. And basically, their initiative is to replace plastic water bottles. So, they have an amazing water filtration system, an amazing process of cleaning and reusing glass water bottles and they do that the whole milkman delivery type service, you know, and in fact, their mascot is that milkman from the 40s and 50s, you know, and where they pick up crates of empty water bottles, and they drop off new crates a full water bottles, but again, sustainability. And it came to mind, it reminded me of their concept as well, which is a totally different, you know, material product, but similar concept. So, I mentioned early in our conversation that you do serve some businesses locally in the Lake Norman area. Davidson College is a big client. I love that you have partnered with them. What are some of the other businesses locally? Can you give a few shoutouts?

David
Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to. So, one of the early ones was Summit Coffee in their Main Street location. And they’ve been awesome. Just by being, some of their other locations being a franchise, they still encourage them to continue composting with us. So, we have a few of their other locations in the area as well. And then Pickled Peach right next door. They’ve been a customer for over a year. And more, the most recent client is The Pines, a residential spot. And so that’s been really cool too, kind of a new type of customer for us.

Jeff
Yeah, absolutely. And that makes a lot of sense as well because they would have definitely the food volume. And yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Summit Coffee has been featured on the podcast as well. The CEO, Brian Helfrich was the guest. And yeah, it doesn’t surprise me that they partnered with you. You know, Brian and the whole company culture, they’re very forward thinking and environmentally conscious. So, it doesn’t surprise me at all. Pickled Peach has not been featured on the podcast, but I am a customer. They do have a couple of sandwiches that I love. So, I go there quite a bit. Very cool. I appreciate those shout outs. What are some future plans? What’s the state of the business currently? And what are some future plans coming up?

David
So, future plans, in terms of one future plan is to grow our service area. So, over time, we’ve kind of started out in the heart of Charlotte, added more South Charlotte first and then realized quickly early on that, you know, there’s a lot of like-minded people in the Davidson/Lake Norman area. So, kind of grew to the north. I think that you know, the way Charlotte’s region is growing, we’ll probably have service areas in the Concord area fairly soon. And probably headed west as well towards Belmont, maybe a little past Belmont and Gaston County, especially on a commercial and a restaurant level, it makes a lot of sense with that volume. And the nice thing about that is that while we’re in the area picking up restaurant, you know, we might as well have a few residential customers in the area, or maybe do a drop off like we talked about with those bucket swaps. So, we would love to grow more, because we know there’s people in these cities in the region, not just in Mecklenburg County who want to do this. So, there’s that. Crown Town Compost as a whole, and I should say, Crown Town as a whole, we kind of built this three-part umbrella that we’re calling Crown Town. So, Crown Town Compost is kind of the core of it, and how we got started. In 2020, we added Crown Town Landscapes, which is an all-electric lawn care company. But our real focus is helping customers build gardens and food systems at their homes. So, orchards, and fruit bushes, and that kind of thing, and raised beds. But we know that not everybody does that yet, but most people, well everybody who has grass has to cut it, whether they do it or not. And you know, separate topic, but gas-powered equipment is just so bad. Because there’s no emission control on it. It’s not like vehicles, it’s not regulated. And so electric kind of gets rid of that, for the most part, you know, there’s obviously you have to charge at somewhere. But also, it’s really quiet, so especially people working from home, we’re like, great, we can, you know, reduce emissions and kind of sell this quieter lawn service. So, that’s been really cool to see grow. The third piece that’s kind of in the works is we want to have a hub of sorts, that’s, you know, serving these two businesses operationally. But it’s also acting as a farm to do some of the compost, do more of the composting on site. And then also start probably with some egg raising operations with chickens. Those work really well with food waste, because chickens can eat a lot of food waste and kind of help the compost process. There’s a company in Vermont called Vermont Compost that that’s kind of one of their main methods of processing and improving the compost is through chicken and egg raising operations and potentially eventually adding on some other meats, whether working with pig or cattle. So, that’s kind of the big future plan. We would really love, our big goal, one of our big goals this year is to find that land and buy something or partner with another farm or something like that.

Jeff
Yeah, absolutely. That brings to mind another guest that we had, Carolina Farm Trust. You’re familiar with them?

David
Yeah.

Jeff
Yeah. And a lot of cool work that they’re doing as well. But the idea of urban farms, it was a concept that was new to me, but it’s a super cool concept. And I love that idea. Crown Town Landscapes, all electric. Yeah, my wife would certainly appreciate that, she works from home, from the home office. And landscapers always seem to show up when she’s on a conference call. And not to mention, obviously the emissions Yeah, I mean, you know, this lawn equipment is you, can tell just by the smell that it’s not really regulated like cars and other machinery. That’s an amazing concept. I love the idea of an all-electric landscape company, that’s really cool. And also helping customers build their own landscapes and gardens. Really, really neat concept. I love that. So, you’re just a few years into this business. You’re definitely building some traction, it’s going well, you’ve learned a lot, no doubt about it. In terms of entrepreneurship and business ownership, what kind of stands out as one of the biggest lessons that you’ve learned? Maybe a piece of advice that you could share for listeners who are considering starting their own business? Or maybe they’re early in their entrepreneurial journey and they need some help. What have you learned that you could share so far?

David
Definitely learned a lot, definitely learn a lot. I’d say, you know, one quick piece of advice that comes to mind, for those who are sort of established, maybe the proof of concept is working, they have customers or if it’s a service, or they have sales or product, I’d say if you’re the owner, or the ownership team, and you’re still doing all the actual work yourself, and that’s kind of put a ceiling on your growth, whether it’s your ability to pursue more sales, because you have so much operational work to do. Or you’re, you know, you’re behind on billing, because you have so much operational work to do or your service is suffering, because you’re stuck on billing and sales. You know, there’s kind of those three main areas operations, finance, and sales. Marketing. So, I’d say, you know, consider, I think that with what took us so long to realize, too long, was that we have to invest in people. And that the payoff from that, when done right, will far outweigh the cost of bringing on more people. You know, even if you pay them well, which you should.

Jeff
Sure.

David
And so that’s taken us a while, we’re still learning that lesson. We had an all-day meeting yesterday with our leadership team, and, you know, we keep kind of it’s like this cycle of, we bring somebody on to help, that frees us up to do for example, sales, and then we kind of fill that person’s time with new service and so much so that one of us has to jump back in and help. And then we’re kind of back in the cycle of not being able to grow the way we want to. Until we realized, hey, we should probably hire somebody else. So, I think, you know, the sooner, and it feels risky, sometimes it is risky. But, if you do it correctly, and have a plan for how you as the owner, or the person who’s stuck in operations, how you’re going to fill up your time to, you know, bring in that new revenue to pay for the person you hired, then it’s a no brainer for me.

Jeff
Absolutely. That’s really good advice, that reminds me of the book, the E-Myth by Michael Gerber. Have you read that book? You basically encapsulated the content of that book with what you just said, you know, that idea of being able to work on your business instead of working in it, and he goes in depth into the challenges of when a technician opens their own business, and now they’re the business owner, the entrepreneur, and the technician, and it’s impossible to scale. And, yeah, that’s really good advice. And I think a lot of people make that mistake. I made that mistake with my first business. Which is why, I mean, I can definitely appreciate where you’re coming from there. Believe me. I lived it for a long time. And it’s really good advice. I would definitely recommend anyone in that boat to rewind this part and listen to it again, because it’s really good advice.

David
If I could add

Jeff
Yeah, please do.

David
So, kind of in that same realm, and it sounds exactly like the book you referenced, about three, four years ago, we jumped into this process called EOS.

Jeff
Yes. Yep. Entrepreneurial Operating System.

David
Yep. So, it’s all about similar, working on the business and not just in the business. And it’s based on a larger book called Traction, and Gino Wickman is the author of that one. So yeah, that’s kind of our operating system, if you will. And that’s paid off a lot, just because it’s so easy to get caught up. And I’m gonna use all these like key words from the book, because we’re kind of indoctrinated into it. So, you get caught up in like the tyranny of the urgent, right, you’re just stuck in the day to day. And so much so that you can’t ever move the needle on these bigger, they call them rocks, you know, moving rocks, so you can eventually get to your goals. And that’s really paid off and helped us kind of work from our, for example, three-year plan back to say, alright, if we’re gonna get there, literally in the next 90 days, we have to do this, or we’re pushing that goal back. And if we can’t do this, that means we don’t have enough people or we don’t have the right people, or we don’t have enough resources. And so, it’s like, how do we find that missing puzzle piece to make sure that this 90-day goal, rock, can happen so that we can get to our three-year, six-year goals.

Jeff
I love that you brought up Traction by Gino Whitman, and the Entrepreneurial Operating System, EOS. I’ve had a couple of businesses that come to mind, I’m not going to name them, but whose founders have basically based their entire business plan for their companies on Traction and what Gino Wickman shares and teaches in that seminal book. And what interests me, what I found fascinating about these entrepreneurs who have shared that information with me on the podcast is that they learned from previous failures. Previous businesses, that for one reason or another, may have been successful for a little while, but ultimately didn’t stand the test of time. And they restarted, rebranded, and with the new company, a couple of them have told me that they’ve like, based their business plan on what Gino Wickman talks about in Traction. So, that’s a great reference. I’m glad you brought that up, I’ll have a link to that for sure in the show notes, actually won’t have a link, I’ll have the title and the author in the show notes. I encourage you to go to Main Street Books in Davidson to order the book, and no more Amazon links on our websites.

David
There’s actually a nice short version, probably an hour audio, or an hour sit down read honestly called, What the Heck is EOS? And it’s his condensed version of Traction.

Jeff
Oh, I didn’t know about that.

David
It’s awesome. Because yeah, I didn’t have time to sit down and read 300 pages. But I read that in a day on the beach. And I was like, wow, what are we doing?

Jeff
Yeah, I love it. I’ll have that in the show notes as well. And I’ll actually download that into Audible today. I’m, sadly I don’t have a lot of time to sit down and read a book. So, I listen to my books through Audible. And I’m able to knock out a lot more books that way. But yeah, and I may order that since it’s short, I can probably knock that out sometime in between other work, but that’s cool, a condensed version of Traction. Look forward to checking that out. David, what else would you like to share with listeners? How can, about the compost industry, the services that you provide, what would you like to share with listeners?

David
Yeah, I think it’d be maybe useful to kind of cover some of the reason why we think composting matters.

Jeff
Yeah.

David
And kind of what got us into this and from a passion, it was because it really did start as a passion project. And then it kind of became a hobby and then it became wow, maybe, you know, if we want to do this for real and have a real impact, we need to actually sustain ourselves financially and grow. So, but the core of it really with compost is that food waste is a major problem. In Mecklenburg County alone, around 250,000 tons of food waste gets sent, gets produced every year. Most of that goes to the landfill, I’d venture to guess 90 plus percent. Some people are composting at home so it’s taking some of that away, some restaurants obviously composting with us and household customers. And then there’s other compost companies in the area that do have some business. Really just, it’s honestly just one, it’s Earth Farms in Gaston County, they do only commercial pickup, and they’ve been a great partner for us. We take some of our stuff there, especially when we got started and didn’t have our own infrastructure, they were, you know, welcomed us to kind of work with them. But I guess so 250,000 tons is kind of the number to keep in mind. And that’s a fourth of Mecklenburg County’s total waste output. Which is a huge amount. It’s really tough to visualize, so we played around back when we got started with numbers and thought you know, what is 250,000 tons look like? And the math adds up. So, one ton of food waste, 2000 pounds, is about two cubic yards of volume. So, if you look at that total cubic yardage, I guess, 500,000 cubic yards or so, it would be like the Bank of America skyscraper in uptown Charlotte, its internal volume. So, we always say, you know, it’s like we fill up that skyscraper every year with food waste, just from this county, Mecklenburg County. And then kind of looking at that on a horizontal plane. If you took that food waste in the tower and dumped it into the Panthers field, it would be two feet deep, the width of the field and then 20 miles long. So, another way to look at that, I thought about this recently, it’s kind of like the width of 77 or 85, from Uptown Charlotte to Mooresville going north or uptown Charlotte to Gastonia going west, it’s just, you know, basically the horizon is how much food waste every year. It’s just a massive amount of waste, which you know, most people don’t like waste. So, just conceptually, clearly that’s not a great thing. And the sources of that waste is also kind of interesting to think about briefly, a lot of ways, I’ve have heard figures, but let’s just say, half of that is actually wasted before it ever comes to our house or a restaurant, you know, from the farm, that production process, shipping it across the country or farther, obviously, stuff, food goes bad, you can’t keep it cold or fresh very long. And then grocery stores have a lot of pressure to only have fresh looking produce or, you know, salad boxes that don’t have a date on it that’s too close. So, you’ll see a lot of them, or I guess, if you pay attention, you’re not going to see a salad box with a date, that’s like tomorrow, right? Because who wants to buy that. So, they’re throwing those salad boxes out a few days in advance. So, there’s just a lot of waste before we ever get a chance to buy it, then we buy too much, it goes bad, or we cook too much, throw the leftovers out. So, there’s a lot of places where food gets wasted. And then kind of the two points, three points why we say waste is bad, one is landfills are not permanent, right? They’re not endless abysses. So, all of our food waste here goes to the landfill by the speedway. All of our waste goes there. We don’t know how long it’ll be there. But it’s not permanent. If you’ve been to a race, you know, it’s kind of, it’s a mountain of waste. So clearly, that can’t keep going up. And the next landfill, when there is one, is not going to be closer. And the region’s developed so quickly in the last 30 years plus that every year, you know, where the next landfill could potentially be kind of gets farther and farther away. Because nobody wants a landfill near their housing development.

Jeff
Yeah, not in my backyard.

David
Exactly. Yeah, not in my backyard. And so, not only are there impacts to the folks who live where the next landfill will be, which is a total other subject, you know, environmental justice, but just simply the cost of driving food, of all trash farther away, money, and then road damage, fossil fuel burning, bad things. The second reason real quick, is that landfills, let’s just say food waste in landfills produce methane, produces methane. And the reason for that is that landfills are really good at squishing air out. And when food waste breaks down with no air, it means it breaks down with no oxygen. And that is, the chemical reaction as it decomposes, produces methane as opposed to CO2, which is also bad as a greenhouse gas, you know, in terms of the ability to capture heat in the atmosphere. But methane is 20 to 30 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So even though there’s a lot less of it, and that’s why we talk about CO2 so much, is it’s just so abundant, relative to other gases, but methane is 30 times, up to 30 times more powerful. The good, somewhat good news is that big landfills like the one we have to use in our region have to capture methane, due to some federal legislation about landfills of a certain size. But the downside is that capturing methane is expensive. It’s dangerous, methane explodes, it burns. It is natural gas is what methane is. So, there’s still downsides despite that the good thing that they are capturing that. The third reason why we don’t want to waste it is that food waste contains valuable nutrients that we should be putting back into the ground, as soil amendments, as compost, to grow better food, not just for us in gardens, but on a commercial agricultural scale. The country’s farms, both small and large, are running out of nutrients in their soil. That’s one reason why a lot of them have to rely on inorganic fertilizer and pesticides so much is that they just don’t have the kind of natural, what was there 100 years ago, when a lot of the operations started scaling. And so, compost really is kind of the key to being able to grow food for generations to come. And on a personal note, you know, if you’re growing food at home in your home garden, it also is going to help you grow better, more nutritious vegetables that give you more nutrients and vitamins and stuff like that.

Jeff
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for sharing those. It’s funny that last point you brought up, I’m in the middle of Whole30 right now, so I’m learning all about organic foods, and that’s like, I go off on a tangent on that, I’m on day four, let me tell you something, it’s about as tough as I thought it was gonna be, but it’s worth it. Totally different subject. So, you mentioned Crown Town started as kind of a passion project slash hobby and that you’ve developed into a business with a, you know, on a mission, and I can relate to that as well. This production and the media company behind it began as a passion project. And, you know, the inspiration we’ve gleaned from that has, you know, just inspired us into building it out into something bigger. So, I can totally appreciate that. And I love small businesses who start as a passion project or even a hobby. I think that’s a great way to start. For sure. David, I really appreciate you joining the podcast. This has been great. How can listeners learn more about Crown Town Compost, and how can they become a customer?

David
Yeah, so the quickest way to learn about us is on our website at crowntowncompost.com. Or on our Instagram @crowntowncompost. Our website has a signup form on there, it’s super easy, you kind of plug in your address to get started. The cost for single family pickup which is every other week is $35 a month, then we have the drop off a little bit less at $20 a month because you have to come to us. And then commercial pricing ranges starts around $28 per pickup, but that, you know, different restaurants and stuff need more or less bins, more frequencies. So, we kind of work with them on a one-on-one basis. Yeah, and I think, you know, if you’re not ready to get started with us, maybe you are, maybe you’ve already composted at home and you’re tired of it, or it’s smelly or it didn’t work. By all means we’re ready to help you out. But if composting is new to you, and you’ve never heard of it, or you’ve heard of it, but you haven’t tried it yet. I’d encourage folks and I always say this, just save your food scraps for a week, you know, grab a Tupperware container when you’re preparing dinner, keep your scraps in there, throw it in the freezer, so it doesn’t smell. And I think you’d be surprised by just how much food waste you have in a week. And then also how nice your trashcan smells when it’s not full of old food.

Jeff
Absolutely, yeah. Super-reasonable pricing. That really surprises me. That’s very reasonable, very affordable. So, the barrier to entry to becoming a Crown Town Compost customer, it can’t be the cost because it’s really reasonable. So, very cool. I’ll have those links, obviously in the show notes, encourage listeners to go to Crown Town, go to their website, learn more about the business and the services that they offer. And David again, thank you so much. David Valder, the co-founder of Crown Town Compost. David, thanks for joining the podcast.

David
Thank you.

Jeff
Big thanks to David Valder for joining the podcast and sharing the story of Crown Town Compost. You can learn more about Crown Town Compost at crowntowncompost.com and follow them on Instagram @crowntowncompost. I’ll have the link to their website as well as the links to the local small businesses we gave shoutouts to in the show notes for this episode. As always, you can find the complete show notes for all of our episodes at the home for Lake Norman’s number one small business podcast, www.thebestoflkn.com. Don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter. It’s totally free and a great way to stay up to date on all of our latest podcast episodes, written articles, and YouTube videos. You can find the signup form on our homepage and in the show notes for this episode. Speaking of written articles, we just published two articles featuring a guide to boat rentals on Lake Norman, and our favorite places for hiking in the Lake Norman area. You can find the articles at thebestoflkn.com/articles. We have more sponsorship announcements on the way for our platform, very excited to share those updates with you. In the meantime, that’s going to do it for this episode. Thanks very much for joining The Best of LKN podcast and for supporting the small businesses throughout the Lake Norman area. We’ll be back next week with another episode. Same time, same place. So, until then, cheers Lake Norman. Bye for now.

Narrator
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of The Best of LKN. For more information about this podcast, show notes, video episodes, and links to our featured businesses, please visit www.thebestoflkn.com. We publish episodes weekly, so be sure to subscribe and stay up to date. Until next time, cheers Lake Norman.