Spinning waste into gold
Entrepreneurs look to turn leftovers, food scraps into compost for new crops
In Houston, your leftovers and scraps — the broccoli stumps, the carrot tops, that peach with a bruise and the moldy cheese — are likely bound on a voyage far outside Loop 610 to a landfill. There, they’ll join an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the nation’s food supply slowly rotting in suffocating conditions, creating methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes significantly to global warming.
But what if all that food waste came to a different end?
Two Houston entrepreneurs are testing that proposition, shuttling food waste to a factory where a banana peel in Montrose and excess parsley in the Heights find new life as nutrientrich compost. Instead of contributing to climate change, the transformed food waste is nourishing new crops of vegetables and reducing runoff.
In other words, garbage habits can change the world.
The startup, Moonshot, got its start when Chris Wood and his wife were expecting their second daughter. “Everyone says kids change you,” Wood said. “You do start to think about: What is the world that we’re leaving?”
If food waste were its own country, it would rank third in the world for the amount of greenhouse gases emitted, after China and the United States, according to the United Nations. A recent U.N. report said reducing methane is the most powerful way of slowing climate change. A 45 percent reduction in methane over the next decade would avert enough global
warming to stave off 260,000 premature deaths, the report projected.
The more Wood learned about what happens to food waste when it goes into a landfill, and how easy it was to process it differently, the more it seemed like a problem worth solving in Houston.
He partnered with his brotherin-law Joe Villa to launch Moonshot in June 2020 with service in eight ZIP codes, and has since expanded to 36 ZIP codes, spanning most of the Inner Loop to as far west as Bush Park.
Homes and businesses can sign up for a subscription to have their food waste picked up at least once a week; households have the option of either taking their compost to a nearby drop off for $10 a month or having it picked up curbside for $29 a month. Moonshot provides customers counter caddies with compostable bags that can be tossed in a plastic bin for curbside service. Upon pickup, the used bin is switched for a clean one for the upcoming week.
“Our thought was, from the beginning, that if our wives thought it was too dirty, they wouldn’t let us do it at home,” Wood said, Villa nodding emphatically. “And that would probably be the sentiment a lot of our customers would have, too: If this is messy, forget it.”
Barbara Crow, who has subscribed to Moonshot for nearly a year, said using the company addressed one of her other cleanliness concerns — when she used to compost scraps in her own yard, she found the food attracted rodents, so she eventually gave up the endeavor. As soon as she learned the company was picking up compost in her neighborhood, she signed up. “If someone else is holding on to it … I thought, oh, great!”
Moonshot trucks start their routes around 8 a.m. Drivers use the company’s app to navigate to each stop; upon hauling in a bin, they first place it on a scale and log the contents’ weight in the app so customers can track how much they’ve diverted from landfills.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, one of Moonshot’s trucks arrived at the Nature’s Way composting facility north of Houston. The compostable bags hit the compost pile with a splash; brown juice seeped out, and eggshells and rotting fruit were visible within, reeking like an overripe port-apotty. But the food was quickly mixed into the pile, made largely of yard waste, and the scent disappeared. Instead, the air smelled sweet, like molasses — a byproduct of the sugars in the plant waste being broken down by microorganisms working so hard the piles reach temperatures of 170 degrees. After a rain, the composting heaps release curtains of steam.
The resulting compost looks and feels like crumbled Oreos and smells faintly of carrots. John C. Ferguson, founder of Nature’s Way, said the product has been in such demand that he had sold out. “People want it. There’s just not enough recycling material.” In other words, not enough organic waste, such as the food many Houstonians throw away.
While curbside composting is just starting to take off in Houston, it’s much more commonplace elsewhere. In San Antonio and Austin — and soon, in all of California — it’s a city service, alongside trash and recycling pick up.
But Houston is one of only a few major American cities that does not directly charge a fee to pick up solid waste. Instead, it relies on tax dollars, which means that the city’s trash and recycling pickup services have to compete with other budget items for funding. Some years, it’s hard even to secure the money needed to keep the fleet of garbage and recycling trucks running. Here, the prospect of a city-run composting program seems remote.
In fact, the pervasive perception that trash pickup is free could provide challenges for even a private company trying to make curbside composting take root in Houston. In places such as San Antonio and Austin, composting is an economic decision — in San Antonio, city pickup for a standard 96-gallon trash bin costs $26.76 a month, while pickup for recycling and compostable materials is free. If a customer separates all of that material from their landfill waste, they could switch down to a smaller trash bin and nearly halve their expenses: A 48gallon bin costs $14.76 a month. In Austin, the savings are similar.
In Houston, there are no such incentives.
A silver lining for Moonshot’s operations, however, is that the customers who opt into composting in such an environment are motivated to do it right. Contamination is a huge problem with city composting programs. So many people toss in noncompostable materials — the rubber bands that bundle broccoli stems or stickers that signal the brand of avocado — that entire truckloads are rejected by composting facilities and sent instead to the landfill. This happens to roughly a quarter of San Antonio’s municipally collected compost, according to a 2020 report.
Moonshot has never had to scrap a single load of food waste. Drivers are taught to look for nonorganic materials. If they see a restaurant has accidentally thrown latex gloves into the bin, they’ll take a picture to let management know and use a grabber tool to fish it out. Moonshot uses texts, emails and social media to communicate what’s compostable and what’s not — for example, if a new bag is being advertised as “green,” Moonshot may weigh in to its customers on whether or not it can go in the bin.
Nonetheless, the program has yet to reach the density of customers that will make it profitable. Moonshot, which is still funded by its founders and employs a team of eight, is preparing to seek out investors.
Wood believes that Space City, which carried people to the moon and invented the air-conditioned stadium, is ready for a change.
“We still handle trash essentially the way the Romans did — we go to the edge of town and drop it off,” he said. “We can do it better.”