Marketplace Features Community Composting Entrepreneurship, Interviews Brenda Platt

Date: 12 Feb 2018 | posted in: Media Coverage | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

In the News: Brenda Platt

February 12th, 2018

Media Outlet: Marketplace

Britta Greene of New Hampshire Public Radio reports a story featuring the local economic power of community composting. For her story, broadcast on Marketplace on February 12th, 2018, Greene detailed composting entrepreneurship in northern New England and gained national context from ILSR co-director and Composting for Community initiative director Brenda Platt.

We’ve embedded the audio below and replicated the part of their transcript featuring Platt:

Community-scale composting businesses are increasingly cropping up, according to Brenda Platt, who’s studied composting nationally with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a Washington, D.C. based non-profit that promotes economic and environmental sustainability at the local scale. “Food waste has gotten so much attention in the last few years,” she said.

More and more people are realizing the benefits of compost, she said, and some states are even starting to require food scraps be separated. That’s driving new business and innovation.

Saturley-Hall’s now wondering whether she could market her service anywhere and contract with local drivers who could be assigned customers and a route. Or, in startup speak: “create a technology that allows anybody with a car to be a hauler.”

And there’s plenty of food waste that needs to be disposed of — the Environmental Protection Agency says more food is thrown out in everyday trash than any other single material. The agency has set a goal to reduce that waste by half over the next 12 years.

Read the full story here.

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Nick Stumo-Langer

Nick Stumo-Langer was Communications Manager at ILSR working for all five initiatives. He ran ILSR's Facebook and Twitter profiles and builds relationships with reporters. He is an alumnus of St. Olaf College and animated by the concerns of monopoly power across our economy.