Tommy's Composting Reaches Million-Pound Milestone
Mary Summers picks up food waste from Lee Elementary School. She collects about 2,500 pounds a day, five times what she picked up during her first months of opening.
She hopes to triple that in the next two years.
The owner of Tommy's Compost Service said she's been working diligently to collect residential and commercial food scraps since opening in 2021 to make the world a healthier place for her young son, Thomas, for whom the business is named.
"I was a middle school teacher, I taught science for five years," she said. "I also was a conservation specialist for some local towns when I wasn't teaching, so I felt I needed to do something more concrete to promote a greener future."
Summers said composting is great for the environment and helps put food back into the soil where some of it came from and not wasting it.
"That's one of the coolest things about composting is that not only are we taking it out of the trash but if it were in the trash it would be creating methane in a landfill, so that's the science of it," she said. "The food contains carbon and nitrogen and if it breaks apart in a landfill that carbon has nowhere to go so it escapes as a gas called methane. If it's composted, that carbon is recycled back into the soil and is readily available for plants."
Residents can put any type of food waste in the five-gallon bucket and leave it outside for Summers to pick up.
Summers said there are misconceptions that it's hard to do, or that the buckets will attract animals or smell, something she says she rarely hears about.
"It does not have the nuisance that you think it is with like flies or smell or animals because it's emptied so frequently that you don't have those issues and … it's way easier to get started than you think," she said.
In her first six months of operation, Summers collected 500 pounds, joking she can now do that in one pick up. In 2022, that rose to 60,000 pounds and, in 2023, it was 321,144 pounds of food waste. The numbers kept growing, with last year almost almost doubling at more than 650,000 pounds.
Summers said she collects around 2,500 pounds a day and, in the summertime, that can change to 12,000 pounds a day.
She plans to reach 3 million pounds by 2027, helping to keep food out of a landfill. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says nearly 22 percent of waste, some 63 million tons, in 2018 was food or organic.
"Every bucket makes a difference. And it's just accumulated so much, like a million pounds, it just blows my mind," she said.
Tommy's Compost picks up from more than 200 residents and nearly 50 schools, businesses, and restaurants around Berkshire County. It costs $21 a month for biweekly pick up and $31 a month for weekly pickup.
She aims to keep the compost within the community and has partnered with local farms like Meadow Farm in Lee to drop off her compost.
"All of our trash has to travel hundreds of miles to get to where it's going but when we compost … you're keeping your food in the county," Summers said. "It's the heaviest part of our trash. It's not going hundreds of miles away to a landfill somewhere — it's staying right here in the Berkshires and we're creating beautiful soil and encouraging our own healthy food systems here."
Summers is not only growing in the amount of food waste collected but also plans to add two new electric cars in the next few months.
"The whole point is to have it as least of an impact on our environment as possible. So, the next vehicle will be an electric cargo van so that when I am sitting and idling it's not using any energy it's incredibly efficient and it's charged with renewable energy so it's a triple win," she said.
You can see how many pounds Tommy's Compost has collected to date on its website as well as how to get started.
Tags: composting, small business,
