Treasuring our Trash #247

Tyler Frank:

Now, when I'm at like an event and there's no option for like where to throw my napkin other than the trash, it's like holding it above the trash can for the few fateful seconds and then like, okay, I guess I have to let it go. Doesn't feel right.

Kevin Roche:

Well, nobody wants to be a neighbor to a landfill. And you know, landfills can grow in size quite rapidly.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine radio show number 247, Treasuring Our Trash, airing for the first time on Sunday, June 12, 2016. Gone are the days when we can toss our unwanted items in a landfill or burn them in the backyard. We have come to realize that we live on a planet that has finite space, a space that we want to keep clean for our children and the generations beyond theirs. Today, we seek to look at trash as a resource rather than refuse. With our guests Tyler Frank, founder of the curbside composting program Garbage to Garden, and Kevin Roesch, CEO of Ecomain. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

People have been listening to the radio show for a while know that I'm a big fan of compost. I can't deny it. I think that composting is a beautiful thing. And the individual I'm going to talk with next also believes that compost is a beautiful thing. I hope. I think this is Tyler Frank, who grew up backyard composting in North Yarmouth, Maine. After graduating from Chevrous in Portland, he attended Boston College, majoring in economics. After returning to Portland, Frank explored a number of career avenues starting A web company with a friend, working for a car dealership and running for the Maine House of Representatives. Shortly thereafter, Garbage Garden took root. Maine's first curbside composting program and the most successful program like it in the United States. Congratulations.

Tyler Frank:

Thank you very much.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is good stuff. I love that you have done so many different things and they've brought you back to composting.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of just a lifelong entrepreneur, which, I mean, in a broadest sense of the word. I just am a lot of different interests. I like to create things and creating an organization like Garbage to Garden has been definitely the most difficult and most rewarding so far.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Tell me about the whole like economics major. I think I'll work on compost. Like it seems like as an entrepreneur there might be other things that. Well, like web design or some of

Tyler Frank:

these other things that you've done. Well, I mean, economics is just something that I'm personally interested in. Economics and history, you know, when it comes to composting, it just seemed to me that it was something that was needed and therefore an opportunity. I had started a web development company with my best friend James, who I grew up with in like 2007, I want to say. And that was just because he had the skills. He was a developer and a designer. And I, you know, I thought I could sell ice to an Eskimo. So together, you know, our powers, we could, we could do that and be self employed. And that was kind of. We learned a lot because we grew really quickly and then, you know, we grew too quickly and then we couldn't sustain the revenue and kind of blew up the company. We were young and learned a lot of lessons. But you know, I brought some of that to Garbage to Garden and bootstrapping something from nothing. It was very much like, don't spend money until you've earned it. You know, you just had. It was just starting off with like few hundred dollars and buying 12 buckets and then, you know, getting a few more signups at a farmer's market and going out and buying some more buckets and just kind of turning it over and do working for free. But I mean there's, you know, the reason that I got into doing that at the time that I did is I had just left a very full time career at Lee Toyota, moved to Portland because I had been living in North Yarmouth. And when I moved to Portland, I found myself in a second floor apartment that shared a tiny yard and there was no space to compost at all. So for the first time in my life something that had just been everyday and normal was impossible. And, you know, we're buying these blue bags and throwing food in them, and it just didn't feel right. And it was actually my roommate's comment that if, you know, we could just put it at the curb, like recycling, it'd be easy to compost. That got my gears turning. And, you know, having been acquainted with the Portland community just seemed like something that, you know, wasn't offered and that a lot of people might appreciate. So I didn't really know if I could do it and, you know, do it and financially make it make sense, but just went after it and it's worked out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I've had the same experience that you're describing. There's something. If you've been composting, if you've been. If you have a pile, if you have a rotator, you know, to put it in a bag that's gonna then go to a landfill and then not biodegrade, or if so, like, not for millions of years, there's something wrong that just seems wrong, not like a sin, but it just seems. It just doesn't. Just doesn't work.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah. Now when I'm at, like, an event and there's no option for, like, where to throw my napkin other than trash, it's like holding it above the trash can for the few fateful seconds and then like, okay, I guess I have to let it go. It doesn't feel right. But, you know, it was. It was really something that most people in an urban area like Portland had no choice but to do. So. Yeah, one thing that was interesting was, you know, I had the philosophy of like, fail fast, fail cheap. If it wasn't going to work, I didn't want to put all kinds of time and money into trying to make it work. So I launched Garbage to Garden six weeks after having the idea with no preparation at all, like, you know, no plan of how to pick up buckets or where to compost them or how this was going to work at all. Just sort of made a website, made it, conceived of a service, picked a number, a price out of thin air that I thought people would maybe pay that would, like, justify, you know, the service and just was a lot of luck actually that it worked out. But we were bringing food waste to my mom's backyard in North Yarmouth for like six weeks, probably maybe two months, until my mom was like, tyler, no more. This is getting out of hand. And on that that note, actually, the day that I at one point had 1855 gallon drums full sealed in her driveway. And she's like, Tyler, I said, no more of this. And I'm like, mom, I'm not going to empty them. I know. I just need a place to put these. The code enforcement officers all over me on Vesper street in Portland. And I'm going to figure something out soon. I'm on it. And it was this one particular Wednesday morning. Wednesday is our big day. And at this time in September 2012, we already required a trailer to collect all the material from the households that day. And we needed barrels to fill and they were all full already in North Yarmouth. And I had to. I had just found Benson Farm in Gorham. And so that morning I was able to go get barrels, bring them to the farm, empty them out, and then go do a collection route and just like scraped by there. So thanks to my mom's kindness and generosity and actually that area of her yard is very lush now, I had a pretty good sized pile of food scraps and now it's, you know, all overgrown.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I do love the story. I'm just thinking if one of my kids did this to me, I'd be like, are you kidding me? Like, do I really need to have an entire driveway full of barrels or an enormous pile of somebody else's food scraps in my backyard? That's a lot of, I guess, patience and support of you.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah, I'm really lucky that my mom has been supportive of just about everything. Although I think at that point she didn't think it was gonna work out. She thought she was just gonna end up with a huge pile of food waste and be holding the bag, so to speak. But yeah, we got 174 households in our first month that signed up. So it was scrambling for sure. But after partnering with farms and finding a little commercial space we could operate out of, we were kind of, at least the death threats were gone, we were off the ground a little bit. And then it was just a lot of work to just build it up and add trucks and keep them on the road. And yeah, I actually lived in a tent the following summer at the shop just to make ends meet.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, you know, this is something that I don't think a lot of people think about. We in this, strangely, in this day and age, a lot of us think like startup venture capital. You get a lot of money, you throw it at something and then you become successful because you get that kind of financial support. But you're talking about get a little money, invest, get a little Bit more money, invest some more. Like you're talking about very steady but mindful growth.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you might call it bootstrapping, but there's, I think, a lot to be said for that. I mean, certainly everybody these days, all you hear about is the idea of being an entrepreneur is just what you said. Get a business plan, get somebody to give you a bunch of money, and then your idea comes to fruition. But there are other ways to do it, and one doesn't exclude the other. Like we're looking at, you know, we're probably going to be raising money in the future as we go to expand and scale into other states. But, you know, this was my. My baby, I suppose, and to be able to create it without that outside venture capital help has, you know, allowed a lot of. Allowed us to stay true to our mission, you know, to really be able to build an organization in the image that we wanted or I wanted without, you know, an outsized influence from somebody who's writing checks. So I think that that's been important, at least in this. In this endeavor.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So tell me about the logistics. I know I was telling you where I live, I see the little buckets by the roadside and I'll know it's garbage to garden Day. And so I live out on Little John Island. But you service a pretty broad area.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah, we service like 1 in 6 Portland households. And then also we service a good number in South Portland, in Westbrook, Falmouth, Cumberland, Yarmouth, as you say, and even Brunswick. And then we do commercial service, which is done differently, but same idea for businesses and schools and bakeries and restaurants. From Old Orchard beach to Freeport to Standish. We do colleges. So, you know, the residential program has definitely been our, you know, our big claim to fame. And I think we've been so successful because of the clean buckets making it so easy. It's on your trash day, you know, make it rewarding so you get the finished compost back. So hopefully that encourages more local food production and also the accessibility piece of just making, you know, it's free if you volunteer with us, so there's really no reason not to do it if. If you care about where your waste goes and you need a way to compost. So, yeah, I mean, logistics are. There's a lot. There's a lot to it. And I've. I went from, you know, just sort of having an idea to now knowing quite a bit about running a trucking operation, which, you know, it's a good skill to have. It's A lot of things you could apply that to. But yeah, so I could take logistics in a lot of directions.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, yeah, so, okay, there's. I don't know when I was interviewing the guy from Eco Main who talks about solid waste.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And he doesn't mean solid waste like human waste. He means like stuff that goes to possibly landfills, possibly recycling, that sort of thing. But he talked about the ick factor of composting. He's a big fan of composting. But there is the ick factor.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So talk to me a little bit about that.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah. Well, so someone's thinking about joining our program. They're like, well, is it going to smell? You know, like, I'm going to have this bucket full of this food scraps. It's degrading in my house. It's like, well, yeah, but you're going to have that in your trash. You already, in fact have that in your trash bag. So, you know, in one sense, being able to take all that smelly stuff out of your trash and put it in something else that's sealed, that gets picked up every week allows you to maybe keep your trash around and not put that bag out every week and stuff it full. We have some people who can go six weeks with one trash bag. So in that sense, you're making it cleaner. But it's the perception that it's gross. And it would be if we didn't wash the buckets, for example, and we just dumped that thing out and you had this bucket with grime smeared all over it, then that might turn you off to it a bit. You know, it's a bit of work. But I think that that has allowed us to make a very effective program for everybody. The, you know, the compost that you get back is certainly not. Not gross. It has a little earthy smell. But yeah, the home composting, even to do it right, you know, you've got to get in there, you've got to turn your pile around, you've got to flip it over. You know, there's other challenges that maybe aren't the ick factor, like just getting out in the snow to dump bit somewhere or just the space or the time. So there's a lot of reasons why it's tough for people to do it on their own. And the ick factor is a major one.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I think there's also sometimes there's convincing the other people in the household that they want to be a part of this. I know that my children, who for many years I made them do the compost run, because my parents made me do the compost run. There's the compost that you go put the compost in the compost pile. Right. And they were reluctant because, you know, it's not necessarily a fun job in January when you actually have to shovel way out to the compost pile. And so the convincing of people sometimes can be tricky.

Tyler Frank:

A lot of people don't like change, you know, as I think you know, you need at least one member in the household who's, like, really dedicated to the change. It's like, honey, no, we're doing it this way. You're just going to have to deal with it. That's sort of how change happens in the real world. But, yeah, I think you mentioned seeing a bucket on the street and then seeing another one, then a couple months later, another one. I think that that probably goes a long way to legitimize a new way of doing things. You'd think that we've been doing this four years, that maybe everybody that wanted to do it joined in the first year. And the truth is, our last year, we've grown the fastest rate so far. So I think you can only attribute that to people continuously kind of coming around to accepting a new way of doing things.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You also make it very easy. I mean, this is the way that you are doing this is. Honestly, I don't think that it could be easier. People just put the stuff in the bucket. Bucket goes out to the curb. I mean, you already have to do it with your trash. And it's not even that expensive, because I've looked into this, and it's like, it's almost worth, you know, not having my own compost pile. Of course, then I'd miss the morning trips out there, so probably won't ever do garbage to garden. But it's only because of my own, like, spiritual need, I guess, to commune with the compost. But, yeah, but this is just so. It seems very. At least from a consumer standpoint, it seems seamless.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah, that was my intention from the beginning. It was like, how can we make this as simple, as convenient as possible? I mean, I don't know. If someone has any idea, then I'm always looking for that information. But, you know, it's like you put it out there and it just magically turns into a fresh, clean bucket and bag of finished product. It takes a year to turn that, you know, food scraps into good compost. But, you know, you set it out a couple hours later, bam. Everything's, you know, magically as it should be. So. And you know, we also find ourselves answering a lot of questions, not just about what can compost and what can go in the bucket and how we can break down meat and how things that aren't organically grown can make compost that's good for growing organic food. And, you know, we answer questions about how to use this finished product, how, you know, can, you know, how to cut it with topsoil, like how to use it for planting. And we do a lot of compost deliveries. We're installing raised beds for people this year. So we've, you know, really kind of branched out into educating people in a lot of ways and kind of participating at all levels of the loop of the life of food scraps.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Food scraps have become a big issue.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah, they are. I mean, 40% of what we throw away is biodegradable. And nationally, 3% of that material is composted. So 97% nationally is actually going to a landfill. There's a, there's a few issues with that. The, you know, I like to think of composting as the most important issue of sustainability because it's got three pillars to it. One is obviously waste reduction. 40% of what we throw away is like the largest single component of municipal garbage. But also, when food scraps break down in a landfill, there's no oxygen. And in that environment, they release the most methane and carbon dioxide. And methane is 20 to 30 times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. So it all adds up that food waste in landfills is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. So if you're cutting that back, you're reducing that in a major way. And then the third pillar is our whole food system is somewhat unsustainable. It's based on importing a lot of chemical fertilizers. You're just sowing the ground with liquid like nitrogen and npk. I don't know exactly what they do, but I know that they're not putting the actual organic material back in the soil. They're just adding the liquid fertilizers. And over the time, you know, you're pulling the organic matter out and that's what holds all the water in the soil. So that's why soils get harder and drier and require more fertilizing to be able to produce the same amount of food. So it's just sort of a long term path to being able to produce less food and having a less productive soil if we don't return those nutrients. I mean, there is A carbon cycle. And it's, you know, it needs to be a cycle in order for it to work for thousands of years. So I was kind of on one there about the importance of it. But, you know, I just think that it is the most important issue of sustainability in our time.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And they're doing this at an international level as well. They're thinking about food waste on an international level.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah, I mean, I get kind of focused in on the, you know, on what we're doing here on the ground, but you hear about it from all, all directions. There's, you know, there's a documentary out there, Just Eat it that I just saw recently. You know, it's about people that survived going all around the country. I think it was some amount of time that, like a month or several months that they ate nothing but food from dumpsters that was being thrown away. That was totally good. And it was trying to educate you that sell by dates are not when food goes bad. You know, that's just something that is on there. That doesn't necessarily mean that food's bad. You got to use your senses to determine if something's good to eat or not. And, you know, I think something like one third of the food that's produced on the planet goes to waste before it ever is, like, potentially consumed by someone. So there's more to the issue than just what do we do with food that's wasted, but how can we cut back on the waste of food? You know, have a little bin in your fridge that is a use eat me first bin, you know, and put things there that are gonna go bad. So I think that, you know, having people, once people start separating their food scraps and putting them in a different bin, you see how much you do waste. You know, that's. That's money. If you can find, you know, people start to find ways to reduce the amount they're throwing away and find ways to actually eat it before it gets to that point. So I hope that we're helping to encourage that change. But, yeah, internationally, I think it's like the UN's theme for the year was food waste reduction. I don't know much about their initiative, to tell you the truth, but I do know that I mentioned that 3% of the food scraps nationwide are composted in Maine. I'm proud to say that's extremely different. In Portland, it's about 25%, thanks to us. And now even other companies that have come in to help get that stuff out of the waste stream

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

and you work with local farms. Is there like a big. I just. I'm just kind of curious. So is there like a giant compost pile somewhere that you're constantly turning and moving?

Tyler Frank:

And there's a few of them. There's. Our first farm we worked with is Benson Farm in Gorham. And that's still where a lot of material goes. And that's a huge compost pile. I mean, they have windrows, which is just another fancy word for a long pile that are probably 15ft tall and, you know, 15ft wide and 200ft long. And, you know, there's just dozens of them, and they get turned periodically. Nature does all the hard work. All you really do is monitor piles, make sure you get the right balance of carbon nitrogen material, and turn it. When, like, the temperature starts to drop, it might mean that it's not getting enough air. So, yeah, it's an enormous pile. And that's actually the reason we can accept meat and dairy and bones and paper towels, stuff you can't really do in your backyard. Just because when it gets that big, the bacteria that live in that pile heat it up to higher temperatures, and then new bacteria, thermophilic bacteria, will come in and can break down more complex proteins. Actually went there. I was at the farm once recently. Well, I guess it might have been a little while ago, but there was a whale that had been found on the beach. I want to say it was maybe a beluga whale, but they put that whale in a compost pile, give it a month or two, go back and open it up when the flesh is degraded, but not the bones, and can exhume the bones for. For students. So that's. That was pretty cool. But there's also, you know, we are diverting 50 tons per week now of food scraps. And so there's, you know, we need more than one outlet. We're proud to support local farms, but also we work with an anaerobic digester up in Exeter, Maine, that makes electricity from food scraps. So a good, you know, several times every day go up there. And that's pretty. Pretty neat because, you know, it's far away, but they are making energy from it, and they're still getting a fertilizer product out of it. And the energy is produced by burning the methane, but you can also condense that and make a renewable biogas that is basically the same thing as natural gas. And so one day we hope to be able to power all of our. All of our. Any gasoline vehicle you can convert to run on Natural gas. So we can run our fleet on biogas one day and basically have zero footprint in terms of fuel that we're using. So the future is pretty cool, I think, in this industry.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How many households do you currently have?

Tyler Frank:

We've got. We've broken 5,000, so it's quite a few. And then we have got one to 150, probably commercial locations that we compost with.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What's your goal? What would you like to see happen?

Tyler Frank:

Well, I started out, I had a goal of 5,000 households. Just was an arbitrary. Like that would be a lot kind of number, but. But the goal is to get, you know, our. The goal is to get all the food scraps out of the landfill. And where, you know, how far do we extend that? Certainly I consider southern Maine as our target area right now. But we think we have a program that's successful enough that we can replicate that in other urban areas. We're aiming to do that very soon, actually in Massachusetts and Vermont has Vermont and Mass. And Connecticut and Sioux Main all have organic waste bands, landfill bands. So they're phased in and they start with just large generators that make one ton or more per week. And they say that you have to send it to a composting facility or an anaerobic digester. And that's going to step down closer and closer to the household level. And so it's sort of making the market in those areas. And a lot of towns and businesses are really struggling to figure out how they're going to comply with this. And they really need us down there. So we're going to be trying to replicate our model. I mentioned James, who I started the web development company with, I grew up with. He's on our team now and he's built a proprietary software that manages our whole operation. So soon drivers will be able to actually just use tablets in the trucks to complete the route. And everything is just managed all live and very seamless. And it will also enable us to communicate with trucks in other states so that we can start these satellite operations and still have our home office here in Portland. So that's where we're trying to go with it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Who ever thought that garbage could be so glamorous? Yeah, it's good stuff actually. How do people find out about garbage to gardens?

Tyler Frank:

How do they find out about it? Well, there's a lot of information on our website, garbage to garden.org and you know, we are at 57 Industrial Way in Portland. It's a pretty cool area. They call it Industrial Way because that's where all the breweries are at Galagash Bissell Brothers Foundation. So people can come by for a tour and visit with us and stop and have a beer somewhere right afterwards if they like.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I'm really interested in what happens in your. In the future. In the future of Garbage to Garden. I'm kind of fascinated by all this. It does my heart good knowing all these years that I had to fight with people to talk about the importance of compost. Even people in my own household, like, composting is so important. But it makes me feel happy that I'm now, along with 5,000 other households that are at least participating in your program and I'm sure countless other people who are doing their own composting. I'm so glad it's become a thing. I know that our audio producer, Spencer, he's a big fan of composting. We're all on your side, Tyler, but I give you a lot of credit for hanging in there and finding something that really works and making it like a really practical solution.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah. And we, you know, I mentioned we're branching into other areas like we do this summer. We're doing all kinds of events. Events are very wasteful, and that's not just food, but all kinds of waste. So we partner with event planners to provide a zero waste event service and try to incentivize the food trucks and things coming in to use recyclable and compostable materials. And we make, you know, compost and recycle stations available all over and just make it as close to a zero waste event as possible with volunteers and such. So we're gonna, you're gonna see us at all these concerts and fourth of July in different places. And, you know, as much as possible, we want to be, you know, we want to connect with the communities that we're in to help foster that social change.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We've been speaking with Tyler Frank, who is one of the originators of garbage to Garden. He's the founder. I'm excited to hear about what's going on, and I probably should be less excited about composting because it doesn't seem that exciting. But I am, and I love what you're doing and I'm really appreciative that you came in and you talked to us about this today.

Tyler Frank:

Yeah, well, I'm really glad to be here and I hope to be back sometime.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

speak with Kevin Roach, who is the Chief Executive Officer of ecomain. As a result of a nationwide search, Kevin joined Ecomain in 2004. He has worked in the field of solid waste management since 1988 and his experience includes positions as the Director of Solid Waste for Broome County, New York, Materials Recovery Administrator for the City of Glendale, Arizona Manager for Metro Waste in Rochester, New York, owner of MRF Incorporated, a recycling facility in Rochester, New York, and the Solid Waste Coordinator for both Monroe county and the city of Rochester, New York. Kevin is a 1989 graduate of the University of Buffalo, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Geography and Urban Planning Planning. He also holds an Associate degree in Business Administration. Thanks for coming in today.

Tyler Frank:

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have a lot of really impressive credentials behind you. You've been in a lot of different places doing this work for a while.

Kevin Roche:

Sure have. And those experiences all across the country have worked well in developing good policy in solid waste management and recycling.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's not a glamorous position, the whole solid waste thing. Just the name solid waste. It doesn't seem like it's glamorous, but it's very important.

Kevin Roche:

It isn't glamorous. And when I graduated from the University of Buffalo, you know, my passion at that time was computerized mapping. We know it now today as Google. But back then in the 80s, we didn't have Google. It wasn't mainstream. But I loved maps and I struggled with entering the career of solid waste when I really went to school for mapping.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So how did that happen then?

Kevin Roche:

Well, first I did an internship with the City of Rochester and my first project was to assist the city in putting garbage routes onto maps. And at that time they Were still doing it by hand and we wanted to introduce this computerized mapping, really Google, Google Earth. And so that was the start of it. And so I worked on a project for the city, kind of got in deep into solid waste management. At the same time they wanted to develop a recycling program and caught on and I never left it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You also have this geography interest. How does that play into all of this? Is this part of the map thing?

Kevin Roche:

It really is. I mean, I've always been intrigued with maps. And of course, you know, now that we have Google Earth, you know, I spent a lot of time on that. But solid waste management, you know, has a very close connection to the area of mapping.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So when you say solid waste management, what types of solids are you talking about?

Kevin Roche:

So my area is trash. And I tell my 5 year old son, you know, that I'm a garbage man and he sometimes looks at me funny. But it's managing what we throw away in our society and whether we recycle it, whether we digest it, compost it, all of those things is something that we're very interested in.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I can't even tell you. It's like my heart be still. I love talking about this because I think what you're talking about is really so important. We are creating things that we're putting out into the environment that need to go somewhere. And for a long time we were burning trash or we were putting the trash in enormous landfills and that just wasn't sustainable. So now you're actually working on making sure that the waste stream is diverted into the appropriate places. And this is great.

Kevin Roche:

That's exactly right. The placement, as you call the placement of waste. It's so important, important as a civic duty to make sure that the different types of waste end up in the right place. And really that's what my job is all about, is to ensure that happens. We make mistakes, we don't always get it to the right place, but with good community support, we're headed in the right direction.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Eco Maine was called RWS previously. Why was that an important change to make?

Kevin Roche:

It was an important change because Regional Waste Systems was really focused on one technology to deal with waste. And we felt, along with the board of directors, of which there were 29 members of the board, we felt that we really need to focus on an integrated approach to dealing with solid waste with many answers, rather than just having one answer on how to deal with solid waste. So there's really no silver bullet in this industry. It's really making sure that the particular parts or segments of the waste stream ends up in the right place. And so that's how we came up with Ecomain as a more earth friendly name that really focused on an integrated approach to solid waste management and ensuring that waste gets to its right place.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Having lived in Maine most of my life, and a good chunk of it in Yarmouth, I've been around for the evolution where first everything went in the trash and then you could recycle, but you needed to bring your things somewhere. And my parents always had a compost pile, so at least we had that. But now you can recycle and you don't have to separate things out. There's actually single sort where you can have your trash. Either you can bring it somewhere and it's single sort, or you can have it by the side of the road, you can have trash and you can have recycling in one. It's really great because part of this is the ease of use.

Kevin Roche:

That's right. When we first started our recycling programs, you know, 25 years ago, a lot of programs. And recycling has been around a lot longer than that, of course. But when it became more mainstream and available to the general public, we started out with newspapers. Back 25 years ago, everybody was still subscribing to a newspaper. And although there's not many newspapers left out on the curbside anymore, there's still other types of papers like catalogs and magazines and mail and things like that. And so they started these programs with just simple newspapers. Then they added clear glass and brown glass and green glass and tin cans and aluminum cans. And so these collection vehicles turned into trains, having to sort and separate everything at the curb. So the job of the collector, they were spending 50, 60 seconds, sometimes a couple of minutes in front of each house with the truck running. And so we needed another way to do this as we were adding more and more materials to our recycling programs. And so it was more efficient to do the separation at a facility, such as a recovery facility, such as the one that Eco Main owns and operates. It also allowed for ease of participation. So if you just. If you don't have a garage or you don't have a basement, or you live in a small apartment, you might not have the room for all these different containers for all these different commodities. And so if you can put them all into one bin, that was the approach to go. So that's how single sort really came to be. And it really came. There was a wave across the country. It happened very quickly because collection became so much more efficient and you could collect from more households in fewer hours.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I remember separating everything out. And I remember one of the problems was always that my children would kind of question the amount of time that I would take. You know, we had all these different bins and I was always out in the garage and I was always kind of maneuvering things around. And so it became almost a barrier. Not to me, I was fine with it. But it became a barrier when I would ask my own children to go out and recycle things in the barn because they just, it just didn't seem that important. Do you think that making it easier is causing people to recycle more now?

Kevin Roche:

Yes, studies have shown that that's exactly the case. A lot of people came to me and they came and they said, why are you changing this program? I love sorting my stuff. But the program really we were focused on the people who weren't participating. So we knew that, you know, if you were concerned about what to do with your trash, we knew that you were going to participate in any program that was put in front of you. Our market was the non participant. How do we get to that next person who may not be participating in the recycling program? And we did need to make it easier.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what types of numbers are you seeing?

Kevin Roche:

Well, in our case just in the last 10 years, we've more than double the amount of recycled material that comes into our facility. And one of the reasons for that is because we've made it easier for the public to participate in our recycling programs, but we've also made the collection more efficient. A lot of communities before, when you had to sort and separate all the materials at the curb, couldn't afford curbside collection. And now that it's basically one bin a dump and then you go on to the next collection stop, it's become more efficient so that more and more communities can afford curbside collection of recyclable materials.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I know that in our town, what used to be called the dump is now called the transfer station. So even changing that name so that people understand that things don't just go to some magical smokestack in the sky or they don't get buried underneath a big heap, but they're actually probably moving somewhere after that. I think that really was very useful.

Kevin Roche:

It was. Although I bet you a lot of people call it the dump, still call it the dump. That's probably true going to the dump, but that is very, very true is most of the local small town dumps did close because they weren't secure, meaning that they had environmental impacts to the surrounding neighbors and the surrounding community. Secure landfills today are engineered so that they don't have the impact on the surrounding community through a secure landfill. Basically, a liner system protects that from happening. But even so, even with a secure landfill, we still don't want to fill our landfills up with waste that's not needed to go there. And that is why reduce, reuse, Recycling is so important, important composting and digestion and even waste to energy. You mentioned burning trash. Years ago, they just burned trash without any energy recovery. Today, we burn trash with energy recovery and pollution control. So it's a much more controlled environment than it used to be. And we get a 90% reduction in the waste volume before we landfill it. So our landfills will last 90% longer than they would have without energy recovery.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what are some of the problems with having landfills that rapidly fill up with trash? I mean, what are some of the health hazards? What are some of the community hazards? Why don't we want to keep doing what we've been, what we were doing for decades?

Kevin Roche:

Well, nobody wants to be a neighbor to a landfill. And, you know, landfills can grow in size quite rapidly. And we've seen them in Maine. You probably have seen them from the highway. And they often have impacts on the surrounding communities, not so much on the groundwater side, but on the odor side, on vectors and seagulls and those types of things. And so we really want to limit the size of our landfills. We still need landfills, don't get me wrong. We're going to need landfills for quite a long time, I predict. But we have to minimize the amount of waste that go to our landfills, because it's a sheer volume metric, because the bigger they are, the harder they are to manage. And eventually we're going to run out of landfill space. If you go to Europe, they don't have landfill space anymore over there. And they've done a very good job at managing their waste in other ways. Here in North America, we still have a lot of land, relatively speaking, and you're still seeing most of the waste stream still ending up in landfills. We do a pretty good job in Maine here, but there's room for improvement. And so we have to still dig away at the waste stream, what's left in the waste stream, and remove as much as possible and get it recovered.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You talked about landfills not impacting groundwater, but hasn't that been a problem in the past?

Kevin Roche:

Well, unlined landfills certainly had an impact on the surrounding groundwater, and that was an issue. But newer landfills today are built and engineered in such a way that they don't have an impact on groundwater, at least for the foreseeable future. However, landfilling is a storage of waste strategy. The waste doesn't go away. Some of it does decompose, but not much of it. And so it's important that we again, minimize the amount of waste that's going into these landfills so that we don't have to live with this storage of waste for decades to come. I look at landfills as deferring the true cost of dealing with the waste to future generations. So we generate the waste and if we landfilling it, all we're saying is my kids will take care of it someday and their kids will take care of it someday. And so I think that a better solid waste strategy is to deal with that waste today, process it today, recover what you can, and then, yes, you're going to have to landfill a little bit at the end of the day.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What are your thoughts on composting? I know that there are some cities that are actually doing recovery of food scraps, food waste, and creation of compost that then can be used for soils. That's something that we're not quite doing yet. On a larger scale here in Maine, Right.

Kevin Roche:

We have some pockets of some good recovery programs of what I would refer to as food waste or yard waste. There's kind of two components of what we classify as organic waste of the waste Stream. Right now, 40% of it is organic material that can be either composted or digested in a digester. And you're seeing programs being developed across the country, across the world for that matter. And it's becoming more and more popular to recover this organic waste stream. And you know, I think there's tremendous opportunity to reach our recycling goals by adding food waste recycling to our programs. And you know, each and every day you're seeing more and more, particularly on the commercial side and even on the residential side. You mentioned that you you've composted in the backyard. And if somebody can manage their own waste in their own backyard, hey, you're doing the environment a huge favor. And hopefully you're seeing the rewards of doing backyard composting by using that compost. And so we want to encourage that as much as possible. But not everybody has a backyard to do their own backyard composting in. And so we want to make sure that there's an infrastructure that is solution to recovering this portion of the waste stream. 40% of the waste stream, right now and remove it from the waste stream and get it recovered to a usable function.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

The reason I started composting was because my parents composted, and I suspect that my father's father also composted. But I still get a little flack. I still get a little flack from my family. They make a little fun of me because I am so not wanting to put that apple core into the trash. It actually has to become something that is important to you because otherwise it's easy enough to just say, there's the trash. I'll just put it in there. What's your experience with that?

Kevin Roche:

I think life is cyclical, and years ago, they've been recycling for many, many years. And back in the day, they used to send their organic waste to pig farmers and place it back into the earth if it wasn't going to feed animals. So, yeah, I can appreciate what you're saying is that it's kind of coming back once again, because I think what happened over the years is we relied too heavily on straight landfilling, and it's caught up with us because these landfills are becoming giants. And when you see them, all you have to do is take a quick look. I mean, we're talking, you know, within 30 seconds you can see the crisis that is happening when it comes to landfilling. I call it a crisis because if you don't see it, then you don't know it's a crisis. But eventually this waste is going to come back and we're going to have to deal with it. Food waste is an easy way, I say easy, relatively easy way to help divert material away from landfills. The problem with food waste is it comes with the, what I call the ick factor. So if you have a countertop little container for food waste and you put your banana peels in there and your cucumbers and leftover lettuce and things like that, you know, you have to manage it because you don't want fruit flies and you don't want odors. And so it's a little bit harder than just recycling because if you recycle your newspapers, you don't have to worry about fruit flies or your laundry detergent. Containers aren't going to become, you know, they aren't going to have an odor. So definitely it takes more participation when it comes to recycling food scraps than yard waste or recyclables or any other fraction of the waste stream.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Is it also important to be careful with what we actually purchase? To eat, to wear, to use? Aren't Some things, if we send them out to be. Well, let's just. I think about, for example, prescription drugs. You know, I prescribe medications in my medical practice, and some people have for decades been flushing things down the toilet. Now that. That seems like it's going to cause a problem later on for whatever's on the other end of that toilet flush. And at the same time, putting them into the landfills is also a problem. So being a little mindful of whatever it is we're buying to actually use

Kevin Roche:

and being appropriate with it, we call that using your purchasing power to make the right decisions at the point of purchase. And so very important. And actually, manufacturers of products have reacted to that over time. We call it light weighting of packaging. For example, the water bottles these days don't use nearly the amount of material or plastic to make those bottles as they used to. And sometimes they're even hard. They're so thin now that sometimes they don't even stand upright when they're half full. So certainly using a purchasing power is important. And when it comes to. To prescription drugs, we have an answer for that. We have collections for those materials and we send them through the waste energy facility. So they're destroyed. And with all the packaging that comes from prescription drugs, because it's usually more packaging than it is the actual drugs themselves. And so we do recover energy from that waste and it is destroyed. So in our case, I think we have a pretty good solution for processing that particular material. And that's where you always have to find the right place for every item in the waste stream.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So one of the reasons that we had you on the show is one day I was behind, and I told you this story already, so forgive me for repeating myself, but one day I was behind an enormous recycle container that's said Eco Main. And there were these lovely paintings on the side. And it just seemed so friendly. It made me want to. I think it was like a starry night, almost like a Picasso kind of painting. It made me want to participate. It made me want to bring my recycling down and put it in the container. Is there some sort of strategy behind this?

Kevin Roche:

We're drawing attention to ourselves. We feel that it's very important to have an outreach campaign that's effective because we can't operate in a bunker. We need participation from our businesses and residents and our communities. And without that, our programs won't be successful, not even a chance. And so we spend quite a bit of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars on outreach and awareness. But we feel that that investment has a return for us and the return is good participation from our communities in the programs that we offer. And so that's one example of getting the word out and making people question, okay, what's happening to that container? What's in that container? Is it recyclable materials? We have been doing commercials. We have a full time educator that all he does is go from school to school. And if the schools are willing, almost on a daily basis, we have tours of our facility because we feel if you spend a half hour, 30 minutes, 60 minutes at our facility that you become an advocate for good solid waste practices. And so now you become our outreach coordinator and help spread the word and advocate on our behalf. So thank you very much.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, as I said, I love this stuff and people actually make fun of me because I think that all of what you're talking about is so important, you know, that you. It's the inputs, it's the outputs, it's the placement, it's the mindfulness of the choices that we make. And really I think it's important. The way that you're talking with me about it is very welcoming and appropriate. I don't feel as if ecomain is doing finger wagging and saying people need to do this because they're bad if they don't. I feel like what Eco Main is saying is, hey, we're all part of this and we can all make an impact.

Kevin Roche:

Yeah. And I think the ecomain as an organization which is publicly owned by our member communities is unique when you look at it in North America because of its very deliberate, organized way of managing solid waste and recyclable materials.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Kevin, how do people find out about the work that ecomain is doing or some of this outreach that you are willing to have people participate in?

Kevin Roche:

We encourage you to Visit our website, ecomain.org and we try to keep it fresh and current with all the latest and greatest information. And if you're not finding what you're looking for, let us know. And we have staff to make sure that the information is available to our member communities.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We've been speaking with Kevin Roach, who is the chief executive officer of ECO Maine. Thanks so much for coming in and thanks so much for all the great work that you guys are doing over there and that you personally are doing for the state of Maine.

Kevin Roche:

Thanks for having me. I very much appreciate it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

use Been listening to Love Maine Radio Show 247 treasuring our trash. Our guests have included Tyler Frank and Kevin Roesch. For a preview of each week's show, sign up for our E newsletter and like our LoveMain Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as DRLISA and see my running travel, food and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Treasuring Our Trash show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.

[Unidentified voice]:

I literally walked into this leadership room retreat that I had done many times before and for the first time I just saw this. It was the top 150 leaders of the company and I just saw this sea of white men in their 50s and 60s primarily and a few women, but all I could see was the predominantly white men and at the same time I looked down and I was 10 months pregnant. I probably should not have even been at this retreat, but I loved it and so I was very sort of ripe with child, so much so I couldn't even see my toes from underneath my belly. And it just struck me in that moment, that visual of I'm a woman. And it sounds so simple and basic to say that now, but it clicked for me in that moment and that that was the moment that began everything, that changed everything, because I started to see myself as different and I started to get curious. The first part of my journey was to get curious of how that happened and how was I culpable? How did I allow that to happen at the age of 34? How did I get to this place? So there was the unraveling of that and there was rage and anger that came up behind that and processing through that. So it's began with curiosity. It moved into anger. It had me start to look outward into the world and say, where are the women? Where am I out there and what's happening? At that time, I had an advanced degree and I knew the statistics of the disconnect between women who are getting advanced degrees and actually accelerating into the. The C suites. And it wasn't really in the boardrooms, it wasn't really working. So I surprised myself and realized that I wanted to dedicate my work in the world to working with women, which took me by surprise because I did not see that coming. That was not a dream I had growing up. I didn't identify as being a feminist. I didn't know I identify as being a woman. So here I am dedicating my professional life to this informing she changes, which I went on to do. And it was a journey. I worked with a lot of men who I love and still love who were like, you're cutting off half your market share by just working with women. You really should think that through. And I did. And I was thinking, oh my God,

Tyler Frank:

what am I doing?

[Unidentified voice]:

But something wise within me has governed and all of my work with she changes this book. And I've trust I've invested in that. I've often joked that that's the key stakeholder in my business, that wise voice in me. And it served me well. So all of the work, the book that you hold in your hands is really the culmination of my journey of the past 10 years that has taken me to this point. And it began as a conversation about being woman. And then it, as I teased it out further, it became about the range of who I am as a woman and making space for the masculine energy in myself, which I had shamed a lot. And so asking myself where I participated in that shame. And then the feminine energy, what did that even mean? I mean, so it was quite inside out, thrashing around. I call it a street fight on the COVID and an aria because it was totally inspired. And it's such an honor to have gotten that. I'm so glad it's out. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's interesting that you had talked about feminism, because looking back through the book in preparation for today, I really was struck by anger. And the quote that you gave by Gloria Steinem, anger is energizing. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward. And then you ask the question, why is it that when a woman gets angry, she is shamed? Nothing shuts me up faster.