I’m by the bus tubs at the Butcher and Baker Cafe with Rob Kendall, Head of Business Development at Bruin Waste Management. It’s the tail end of Telluride’s winter season and we’re checking out the contents of a compost bucket set up for customers disposing of waste at the end of their meal. 

Stepping outside, Kendall admits the contents are disheartening.

“I mean — there were literally metal forks and knives in there,” says Kendall. “Which tells you a lot about people, right? And tells you that if people see a bin they’ll just throw it out. And training people’s nature is tough especially when they’re on vacation.” 

Bruin Waste is currently running a pilot program to introduce composting to its Waste Management offerings. The pilot is small: Bruin Collects just once a week from three different restaurants in the area — two in Telluride, one in Mountain Village, and also partners with a couple condos and multi-family buildings. 

Compost — a nutrient rich soil which is gold to farmers and gardeners — is made from recycled organic matter: leftover food and coffee grounds, kitchen scraps like an eggshell or an onion skin. In industrial facilities, certain plastic products can also be composted. 

But there is a lot which is not compostable. Napkins, metal, the vast majority of plastic. Educating folks on those distinctions has been difficult. Kendall says they’ve tried a number of techniques:

“Really in-your-face signage, and making— I know it sounds silly — but literally making the compost bucket hard to find. So you really have to make a decision to put something in there,” he says.

As we found, those efforts don’t always bear results from folks absentmindedly bussing their tables at the end of a meal. As such, Bruin has hesitated to introduce composting to the general public — the bucket at The Butcher and Baker was more or less an experiment. They’ve had great success with a more targeted population: the prep cooks, and the kitchen line. 

“For them it’s a lot less decision-making in the back-of-house to throw things away. Versus in the front-of-house they're handling all of the utensils, napkins, things…there are a lot more decisions to be made.”

The benefit of large scale composting is two-fold: it dramatically reduces landfill waste, and food which is properly composted can produce less methane — a harmful greenhouse gas — than it would at a traditional dump. Then, there’s the product: compost can be reapplied in agriculture, creating a closed loop as it powers more vegetable growth. 

It’s catching on. Here’s Kendall:

“One of the major trends in the waste industry is composting. All of the public companies in the major cities are putting in facilities and we’re constantly watching that because our goal is to be a leading waste company country wide. Telluride is the heart of our business and there’s a large appetite for it. So it made sense for us to go into it and we felt like there was an interest in the community.”

Bruin received a number of grants to fund their pilot, including one from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which takes a tax on landfill waste and directs those funds towards waste reduction projects. Each Friday, Bruin collects compost in Telluride and Mountain Village and trucks it 3xm, an industrial composting facility in Olathe.

“We really want to take our time and get it right,” Kendall says. “So we’re taking our time with baby steps. Where it’s been really strong is in the back of house of restaurants. That is without a doubt the best environment for collecting that waste. Where we’ve struggled to have it take off is in multi-families and in the front-of-house.”

It really comes down to education: how can Bruin teach folks in their own kitchens what is compostable and what is still destined for the landfill? 

The rise of compostable plastics, compostable paper containers, and the difference between industrial compost and a garden or farm compost all make those distinctions more difficult. But, Kendall says they’ve seen enough success to push forward. 

“We’ll continue to add on back of house because that will get us the volume we need to sustain a program. And we’ll continue to work with multi-families to figure out how to make those programs more successful,” Kendall says.  

As the program expands and Bruin continues to truck compostables to 3XM in Olathe, someday your coffee grounds could become next season’s Olathe sweet corn. 

And doesn’t that sound delicious!