When Rust Belt Riders launched six years ago, it was just two guys with a modest idea: they’d collect food waste from restaurants and turn it into compost, which they’d sell. Their first mode of transportation to accomplish this was their bicycles.
They’ve come a LONG way. A couple of years ago they moved into the Hamilton Collaborative on the edge of AsiaTown, an old industrial building that hosts a growing collection of creative businesses and entrepreneurs, including Ingenuity Fest’s ingenuity Lab. The big pile of composting materials behind the building was testament to their growth.
“After getting our feet wet in operating our site at E. 55th and St. Clair, we quickly developed a rhythm and system for churning out amazing product at a pretty rapid rate,” they explain. “With space being our limiting factor we knew we needed a system that was in constant motion, material coming in to be composted needed to be timed up with fully composted material leaving the system. At our most efficient, we were able to go from banana peel to fully finished compost in around 45 days! By way of reference, a very active home composter might complete a similar process in 3 months.”
Still, as they grew, they found that they could not turn the food scraps they had access to into compost quickly enough and had to outsource the work to partners such as Kurtz Brothers and Rid-All Green Partnership.
“We constantly were running out of inventory,” they said, as anyone who tried to purchase their line of Tilth products probably discovered. “This is, to be sure, a good problem, but a problem we needed to address nonetheless.”
Now they’ve taken a huge step forward. With the help of Kurtz Brothers, they’ve acquired Cloverleaf Composting Facility off Granger Road, which will allow them to ramp up production exponentially.
“This site is orders of magnitude larger than our old site and will allow us to produce more compost in a month than we could in an entire year by a long shot!” they share.
To celebrate and raise money to expand production of Tilth to meet the demand, they’ve debuted a loyalty bond program through Honeycomb Credit and are currently offering steep discounts on pre-orders for the 2021 growing season. It’s never too early to start planning next year’s garden!
To learn more about the move, pre-order their products and purchase loyalty bonds, go here.
