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Sarah Osborne was bitten hard in recent years by the desire to produce her own food.
It started around 2021. She’d started by watching lots of online videos about the homesteading lifestyle. She then got into raising chickens herself, as well as gardening and composting food waste. “I was like, ‘I want to be a part of that,’” said Osborne, who is 37. “It’s been amazing. I love it.”
Now, Osborne is trying to spread the bug around her own community — Winterport — and in the surrounding region. She and her mother, Laurie Maquillan, are starting a business, Peak Composting, for residents and businesses across the midcoast and Greater Bangor that want to make better use of their own food waste than sending it to the dump.
“Anything that grows from the ground can go back into the ground,” she said.
The opening of the new composting business is part of a larger awakening in the midcoast and other parts of Maine about the growing costs of sending food and other organic waste to the landfill. Not only does throwing away food represent a lost opportunity to feed people, but it also can contribute to climate change by generating greenhouse gases once it’s buried in a landfill.
Composting, by comparison, allows scraps to be converted back into fertile soil that can be used for growing food.
So far, there are only a handful of other commercial composting businesses around Maine, and some of the more established ones are based in the southern part of the state. But several have been growing in more rural parts of eastern Maine in recent years, including ScrapDogs Community Compost in Washington and Chickadee Compost in Surry.
Belfast joined the ScrapDogs network last November for a one-year composting pilot project, in which residents can leave their food scraps at the local transfer station, with the option of getting processed compost in return by paying an $18 monthly fee. To date, the city has collected 10,300 pounds of compostable food waste.
“It’s been going smoothly, no issues,” said Steve Roberts, an operator of the transfer station, this week.
Osborne’s company will operate out of her own backyard in Winterport, using a process called “hot composting” in which decomposing food is allowed to reach the higher temperatures necessary to break it down more quickly. The process can generally take between two and six months.
Peak Composting will offer its services to businesses within a 20-mile radius of Winterport, which includes communities such as Bucksport, Belfast and Bangor. It will start by charging business customers a monthly fee of $25. In return, they’ll get a 5-gallon bucket for depositing their food scraps. Peak Composting will then come retrieve the bucket weekly and replace it with a clean one.
“The goal [is] to make it easy for small businesses to keep food waste out of landfills and turn it into nutrient-rich compost for local use,” Osborne said.
She is hoping to attract customers such as coffee shops, bakeries, supermarkets, restaurants and offices. Area residents will also have the option to bring their food scraps to the Winterport site for a monthly fee of $18, or have it picked up by Peak Composting for $25 per month.
“I have dreams of giving classes to teach people how to compost for those that want to do it themselves,” Osborne said. “That would be great.”
