Bartering Services and Finished Compost for Land Access

This case study was originally published in Keep Compost Local, a report offering survey data, case studies, and policy recommendations to equip governments to collaborate with local composters and foster community prosperity.  

Municipality and Interviewee: City of Bozeman, Nicholas (Nick) Ross, Director of Transportation & Engineering

Community Composter: Happy Trash Can Curbside Composting LLC (Ryan Green, Co-Owner)

Public-Private Partnership (PPP)

Happy Trash Can Curbside Composting LLC (HTC) began offering food scraps collection service to households and commercial businesses in 2016 in Bozeman and surrounding communities. In 2021, HTC relocated its food scraps composting operation to the City of Bozeman’s Story Mill Convenience Site and yard trimming composting facility, located on a closed landfill within the city limits. A 3-year basic services agreement was established with the City of Bozeman to operate HTC’s food scraps composting facility at the site in exchange for processing yard trimmings collected by the City. The agreement was essentially a barter — HTC did not pay rent for use of the site, and the City did not pay HTC to do the composting. In 2024, the City received the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling (SWIFR) grant of $1,605,660 to establish residential food scraps collection infrastructure for up to 7,000 households. The EPA grant award states that the curbside program is expected to prevent 2,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from the landfill each year.

The City issued an RFP for processing the collected food scraps and yard trimmings at the Story Mill Convenience Center. YES Compost (another Bozeman composter and collection service provider) and HTC bid on the contract, which was awarded to HTC based on cost, the company’s history of performance, and the ability to scale operations as more households joined the collection program. The contract term is for three years, with the ability to mutually extend it for one-year intervals up to
five years.

Municipal Motivation

The Bozeman City Commission gave a directive to the solid waste office in 2022 to start a weekly residential organics collection service, as historically, only yard trimmings collection was offered seasonally. Organics diversion is included in the City’s climate action plan, and, over the longer term, it will help preserve landfill capacity in the region and reduce the number of trips to the landfill. The Commission’s decision was made prior to the City applying for the SWIFR grant. The Solid Waste Division is within the Transportation & Engineering Department in Bozeman and is established as an enterprise fund that operates competitively with the private sector. Funds for the Solid Waste Division are not allocated through the general fund. Being awarded a SWIFR grant to cover the capital costs of a residential food scraps collection program significantly lowers the fee for the service to residents.

The City’s Solid Waste Division services roughly 13,000 households out of about 25,000 households in the city. A rate study was done to determine pricing that would be affordable for households and cover the cost of solid waste services. Bozeman selected an “a la carte” approach that incentivizes downsizing the trash cart and bundling service with recycling and organics. To be eligible for organics collection in either 35- or 95-gallon totes, households have to also sign up for trash service. The City provides a kitchen countertop bin and certified compostable liner bags. A wide range of food scraps, food-soiled paper, pizza boxes, and yard trimmings are accepted. The fee to opt in for organics collection is $10 per month, regardless of cart size. An 8-month seasonal option is available. Rollout of the curbside service began in April 2025. About 1,500 households have opted into organics collection. The City will no longer pick up yard trimmings placed on the curb (previously done seasonally at no charge to the households), which is an incentive to sign up for the cart-based service.

Contractual Arrangements

The contract with HTC to compost collected food scraps and yard trimmings from the curbside program is a Professional Services Agreement with more risks and liability for the vendor than the basic services agreement HTC had with the City originally. HTC obtained legal counsel for the negotiations. The Agreement includes an allowance for HTC to operate its composting facility on City property. Payment for HTC’s composting services is based on the volume of unscreened finished compost. HTC composts the City’s material separately from what it collects and composts directly. A 30-cubic-yard City roll-off container is used as the measuring “device.” The City of Bozeman pays HTC $25 per cubic yard and retains 20% of the compost for use in its parks and open spaces. Under the contract, HTC can sell the other 80% of the compost it produces and retain the revenues.

“The contract allows us to haul and compost all material we collect to the composting site at no fee, but other haulers are not allowed to use the facility, e.g., to bring yard trimmings directly there for composting,” notes Ryan Green, Co-Owner of HTC. “Our original agreement did not include a land use clause, and the City was able to end our use of the site at any point. The new contract formalizes our use of the land for a set period of time.”

The City of Bozeman holds a landfill permit from the Montana Department of Environmental Quality for the Story Mill Convenience Site, which also covers a large-scale composting facility permit. HTC is named managing partner on the composting permit.

Composting Activity

In 2018, HTC collaborated with Sustainable Generation (SG) to serve as a demonstration site for two of the smaller-sized 50-foot-long SG Mobile® GORE® Cover aerated composting systems. The demo illustrated the capability of the system to compost increased tonnages on a similarly sized footprint. When it relocated to the Story Mills Convenience Center, HTC continued use of the SG system, and subsequently added four 100-foot GORE covers, each with capacity to process about 300 to 400 cubic yards of material per batch. The total throughput of the four 100-foot GORE systems is 11,000 cubic yards annually. Separately from the City curbside program, HTC operates a private residential and commercial curbside program. “All incoming material from the City is processed in the 100-foot systems,” explains Green. “The original 50-foot systems are used to compost materials that HTC collects. We keep the two streams separate.”

Composting under the covers is done in two 30-day phases; in between the two, the piles are turned with a 1.5-cubic-yard loader bucket. Recently, HTC purchased a tarp winder on a trailer that is pulled with a loader to put on and take off the tarps. “Those 100-foot GORE covers are heavy, and we had been using a loader and a skid steer on each side to cover and uncover the piles,” says Green. “We can now do in five minutes what used to take two hours.” HTC also upgraded to a 3-cubic-yard loader bucket to improve materials handling efficiency.

Currently, HTC has about 1,150 residential subscribers and about 75 commercial accounts. For residential food scraps collection, HTC has a pickup truck with a trailer equipped to carry 64-gallon totes. Households use 5-gallon buckets to set out food scraps, which HTC empties into the totes. HTC collects commercial food scraps using a box truck with a lift gate. It uses a 10-cubic-yard dump trailer to deliver compost to clients.

Outreach & Education, Participation, and Contamination

The City of Bozeman’s target is to have 7,000 to 8,000 households sign up for organics collection service. The program is promoted via interviews with news outlets, social media, and direct mailers to households. Route drivers will staple literature about signing up for an organics cart onto the brown yard trimmings bags that households still set out, even though the new program replaces that free service. Ross explains that about half of the 13,000 households signed up for City solid waste services opt in for recycling collection. “It took a while for people to sign up for recycling, and then it grew steadily,” he says. “We believe the same trend will happen with organics collection.”

HTC has the right to reject loads with excessive contamination. The City purchased two automated sideloader collection vehicles, so the drivers do not inspect cart contents before emptying them into the trucks. After tipping at the composting site, HTC works to remove contamination. As of August 2025, for every 5- to 6-cubic-yard loads tipped, there are about five to ten gallons of contamination, according to Green. Incoming loads are monitored closely, and the City plans to do route audits of organics carts to evaluate the contents.

Compost Markets

Finished compost is screened to half-inch. HTC’s retail price is $70 for a half cubic yard and $80 for one cubic yard. Compost is also sold for $3 per gallon or $60 for a 32-gallon cart. Almost 100% of the compost sold is used on farms and in home and community gardens.

Costs & Benefits: Bozeman

The SWIFR grant covered all the capital costs to offer residential organics collection. This included $900,000 for two automated side-loading collection trucks ($450,000 per truck), $500,000 for 8,000 collection carts, and funds to cover the purchase of kitchen countertop bins, compostable liner bags, and outreach and education materials. “The City would have had a very short window to recuperate these costs if the solid waste utility had to cover them,” explains Ross. “No doubt it would have made the monthly rate for service much higher. Now we have time to plan out future capital investments as equipment needs to be replaced.” Two new jobs were expected to be created at the Solid Waste Division for the organics collection services.

Costs & Benefits: Happy Trash Can

Having an existing relationship with the City of Bozeman helped to facilitate contract negotiations once HTC was awarded the contract. “We had been working with Bozeman for three years under a basic service agreement and wanted to have a contract,” says Green. “The RFP created that opportunity. Happy Trash Can gets paid based on the volume of compost made from the City’s collected organics, and the negotiations resulted in a higher price for the finished compost, but still allows HTC to maintain ownership of the compost and give a percentage to the City. Ultimately, we lost about 100 household subscribers we were servicing in Bozeman who joined the City program, but had factored in that anticipated loss into our budget.” In terms of job creation, HTC expects to hire a full-time composting site operator.

Capital costs for the larger-sized front-end loader bucket were $5,500 with freight. The cost of the tarp winder and several replacement GORE covers was not shared. “We would much rather invest in new composting equipment than collection trucks and dump trailers,” adds Green. “A lot of overhead goes into labor for collection and fleet maintenance, especially because we don’t have route density in the region we service.”

PPP Lessons Learned

City of Bozeman: Nick Ross found that the City’s standard professional services agreement, which is used across all City departments, no matter the service, made it difficult to negotiate the contract with HTC, as it is a boilerplate document that allows little flexibility. “I would have benefited by having a template for a contract that is focused on public-private partnerships with a community composter,” he says. “The level of detail and intricacy in the professional services agreement is beyond the scope that private contractors would be accustomed to. I appreciate the legal nuances around a PPP with a governmental entity in terms of risk and liability, but both our department and HTC had to rely on attorneys for the negotiations.”

Happy Trash Can: The existing working relationship that HTC had with the City of Bozeman helped to facilitate a mutually beneficial agreement for the PPP. “That relationship is what allows our partnership to shine,” notes Green. “Because Bozeman’s Solid Waste Division is an enterprise and is self-funded through the fees for their services, it enables the agency to do more subcontracting for services that it isn’t skilled to do, in this case, food scraps composting.” Its experience with the City of Bozeman is helping HTC lay the groundwork for a second PPP with the City of Livingston, Montana. The company is negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding where it would establish a yard trimmings composting operation at that City’s transfer station. HTC would be able to compost food scraps it collects in Livingston, instead of hauling them to Bozeman, which is about 25 miles away.

More Information

• Happy Trash Can website
• City of Bozeman Organics Collection website
• U.S. EPA SWIFR grant announcement, September 2023
• Bozeman Climate Plan
• ILSR Webinar: Tackling Contamination at Composting Sites (feat. Happy Trash Can)

Featured Photo: SG Mobile® GORE® Cover aerated composting systems at Story Mill Convenience Site. Credit: Happy Trash Can