Our Story | CompostNow

Our Story

Starts with soil...

CompostNow was founded in 2011, in Raleigh, North Carolina. As part of a growing grassroots movement to rebuild soil health, our team saw an opportunity to create a more circular system by diverting food waste from landfills and using that to create nutrient-rich compost for our community.

When we started, our team collected food waste from homes in personal vehicles and washed buckets outdoors. These early years helped our team form a strong connection with our community, and laid a foundation for local partnerships that allowed us to turn food scraps into compost, and cycle nutrients back into the soil.

Takes root and grows...

As we grew, we joined forces with other businesses across the Southeast and Midwest. This helped us expand our knowledge and understanding of the organics recycling industry, and allowed us to diversify our team’s perspective. These expansions made our company stronger, our operations more resilient, and our team better equipped to tackle the challenges of a rapidly evolving industry.

Even as we expanded and diversified our service offerings and capabilities, our commitment to improving soil in our community and quality of life for our team guided our decision-making processes. We have continuously sought to improve the working conditions, pay, and quality of life benefits for our team members and have designed our operations and technology to be more efficient, impactful, and transparent as we have scaled.

Stays grounded in our mission...

Today, we are thrilled to offer elevated pay for all employees; expanded time-off programs that include paid holiday, vacation days, and sick leave; 401k programs; and health benefits for full-time team members. We envision a circular system that takes care of our community in a holistic way, including the wellbeing and health of our team.

As a testament to our belief in a closed-loop system that nurtures the planet, we have prioritized returning compost to local gardens and farms through our Compost Give Back and Garden Partner Program. Meanwhile, our belief in transparent and efficient systems is supported by our in-house software, which tracks and shares the personal diversion data of our members, manages our hauling and logistics, and supports the distribution of compost back into our community.

Gets better one scrap at a time.

Through the collective impact of the households, businesses, and communities we serve, millions pounds of food and organic waste have been diverted from landfills and turned into locally distributed compost.

For over a decade, we have been committed to cycling nutrients back into our soil, and have stayed grounded in our principles to take care of people and planet. As we step into our 14th year of business, it’s your trust and support that fuels our mission to transform the way food and organic waste is managed.