What is Soil Cycle?

Soil Cycle renews food through composting. We haul food scraps from residents, businesses and events to a network of community gardens and urban farms where it’s transformed (lovingly, by hand) to compost. You get some back for personal use (think: happy house plants or water-wise lawn care) and the rest stays on-site for growers to feed the soil that feeds plants that feed people. That’s food, full-circle.

How does it work?

We offer curbside pickups, dropoff stations and ad-hoc services for events.

What is composting?

There's a major gap in the industrial food system between the disposal and production of food that can be filled with a process that returns nutrients to the soil called composting. Composting is like recycling for but instead of metal or plastic, we're talking about organic material, including everyday stuff like food scraps. The end-product of composting is compost - the rich soil amendment that farmers, gardeners and growers refer to as “black gold.” In the circular economy we’re trying to create, every resource that we extract from the earth (for food, fuel, fiber) is ultimately returned and recycled — as it is in nature where there’s no such thing as “waste.” Composting is how we “close the loop” on organic materials, and if/when we really embrace it as a society we can reduce and sequester carbon emissions, bring degraded topsoils back to life and produce more abundant, more nutritious food. What a delicious world that will be!

What is compostable?

Generally, something is compostable if it was once living. On the "heck yeah" side are the most common compostable materials you'll start separating from the trash. Compost those. On the "please don't" side, the biggest no no's are the inorganic materials (plastic, metal, etc.) and pathogen sources (bodily fluids, chemicals, etc.) Fats, dairy and meat are in-fact compostable, they're just a pain-in-the-butt to decompose, particularly in urban environments with curious critters. So, understand that trace amounts are OK: you can scrape leftovers from your caesar salad into the compost, but don't give us more than half a hamburger or any bones.

What should I use to collect scraps?

We recommend that you use whatever you have on-hand that's sealable and reusable, e.g. tupper ware, freezer bags, oatmeal canister, popcorn tin, protein powder container, cut the top off a milk carton, get creative! — and store it in the freezer between dropoffs to stall decomposition, especially in the warmer months. This is the cheapest and most sustainable approach, and who doesn’t love a win-win?

You can also find plenty of countertop compost collectors available online or in stores, but if you wanna buy new, consider choosing one made from recycled material, made/sold locally that will get some good use over the years. We offer these countertop baskets for pickup at the Helen Hunt School or there's this well-made one from Conscious Living, a sweet small business in Old Colorado City that stocks sustainable home goods.

What about bags?

We recommend you line your kitchen collector with a paper bag or a newspaper to step up the tidy factor. Compostable bags are acceptable too, just understand that we sort them out of the collection stream before they hit our compost piles and send them to an industrial facility that's 30 mi SW of here, where they use equipment to sift out unevenly degraded materials. (Spoiler: compostable plastics aren't great from a composters’ perspective, but we also understand they’re useful and convenient. So, if they help you compost then by all means, go for it. Get em from us (or anywhere else just check it meets the standard ASTM D6400.)