Utah Startup: EcoScraps Turns Trashed Food Into Compost & Soil

Former Brigham Young University Student Dan Blake had a revolutionary new idea one morning when he couldn’t finish his french toast at an all you can eat buffet breakfast. This simple act of bringing too much food to the table at an all you can eat buffet is one that happens to many of us. For Blake it inspired him to ask the question “what happens to this wasted food”.

Well Blake found out the facts. Americans produced 250 million tons of trash in 2010, with about 34% of that recycled or composted according to the EPA. The EPA estimates that of those 250 million tons, 33 million tons of that was food trash. That’s a  lot of french toast.  Blake took all of this new found knowledge and began dumpster diving.

While most dumpster divers toss the food aside or ignore it all together in hopes of finding that one buried treasure, Blake took as much food waste as he could back to the parking lot of his apartment and composted it himself. He was able to get a university lab to do a soil analysis to find the best combination of nutrients to compost. From there he and his partners dropped out of college and EcoScraps was born.

EcoScraps now takes food waste from grocery stores, and farms and has it hauled to their compost facilities for a discounted tipping fee compared to the dump. EcoScraps then takes the food waste and turns it into compost and potting soil. They sell their compost and potting soil in Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

The company launched in 2010 and became profitable earlier this year. They currently have 25 employees. Right now Blake is finding that, as with regular trash companies, transportation is his biggest expense.

“Transportation is a killer,” Blake told Reuters . “We spend a ton of our time figuring out how to cut down on those costs.”

Linkage:

For more about EcoScraps check out their website here

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Source: Reuters

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