Case study in using story to sell a service
When I left nightlife for the waste industry in 2018, plenty of my peers had the same question. How does a guy go from running a nightclub to selling composting?
The best answer I ever gave is 52 minutes long and lives on Omaha public radio. The episode is Riverside Chats #49 on 91.5 KIOS, November 2020. The host, Tom Knoblauch, invited me on to talk about circular food systems while I was at Hillside Solutions, the company building greater Omaha's composting infrastructure. It builds a bridge between it all. And it's still one of my favourite examples of using story and narrative to sell a service.
Listen to the first twenty minutes and you'd be forgiven for wondering when the trash talk starts. We cover me DJing at 17. Pop-up club nights in a Spanish restaurant in Benson. Five and a half years running House of Loom. My religious studies degree, of all things. A 3 am dream about front yards full of vegetables instead of grass. The Shabbat dinner where a woman named Betsy offered me her job at a composting startup over the breaking of bread.
Then the second part is where I get into what happens to a head of lettuce in a landfill (it pumps out methane for the next 10 to 25 years), why a recycled water bottle never becomes another water bottle (at least at the time of recording), and why burying trash is the same as burying cash.
Here's why I treat it as a case study.
When I joined Hillside, I inherited the problem every brand has: complex, important material and an audience with no reason to care. We had talking points. Methane stats, contamination rates, the science of anaerobic decomposition. But how do you explain all that in a way that people remember and that gets them to take some action?
I didn't have a name for this at the time. Looking back with five more years of marketing under my belt, I'd call it the difference between delivering a message and being the message.
Hillside's pitch was that waste is a resource and that anyone can act on that today. My nonlinear career was the proof: a nightclub guy retrained into a composting evangelist, still using the same skill of taking something niche and making a room care about it. Every appearance I did had one goal: bring new folks into the fold of what Hillside was doing. A Compost Club signup, a coffee shop asking about bins, a school rethinking its lunch waste.
Five years later, the details of my life have changed. I’m now on a different hemisphere.
But the job description hasn't: take something complex, make it simple and relatable, and hand people an action they can take the same day. Last week, from my desk in Adelaide, I tracked the episode down on an old podcast feed and downloaded a copy, so I'll have it if it ever disappears from the internet.
Here's the episode.
P.S. The full transcript is under the player. Partly for accessibility, partly because I do SEO for a living and 9,000 searchable words is too good to leave locked inside an audio file. 😉
Full transcript
Riverside Chats #49: Brent Crampton on Circular Food Systems and Hillside Solutions
What does a former nightclub owner and DJ know about composting? In this episode of Riverside Chats on Omaha Public Radio, host Tom Knoblauch sits down with Brent Crampton of Hillside Solutions to talk about circular food systems, industrial composting in Omaha, what really happens to food waste in a landfill, and why the great American lawn might be the next thing we rethink. It's a conversation about waste as a resource — and how Omaha can build a more sustainable, less wasteful future.
Transcript lightly edited for readability.
Tom Knoblauch: From KIOS in Omaha and Exorbitant Creative, you're listening to Riverside Chats. I'm Tom Knoblauch, and today I'm talking with Brent Crampton of Hillside Solutions, who's trying to encourage Omaha to embrace a circular food system — not one reliant on all kinds of unnecessary waste.
Brent Crampton: In our sustainable future, you have to imagine the adjustments we're going to make in society. And one of them is that every major community and town is going to have an industrial composting facility nearby. And the good news is that the greater Omaha area already has one.
Tom: Stick around to learn how Omaha's future can become more sustainable, more eco-friendly, and less wasteful as we find ways to navigate the climate crisis.
Tom: And welcome to Riverside Chats. I am Tom Knoblauch, and today I am talking with somebody who I don't actually know personally, but I felt like the stars would align and at some point we would have to talk. I'm talking with Brent Crampton, who is part of Hillside Solutions, which is providing industrial composting for Omaha.
Now, if you've been listening to the show for a while, or even following anything I do, you know I got kind of obsessed with composting — maybe five, six years ago — and it really changed my worldview. It really helped me understand the interconnectedness of everything: of what it means to be biodegradable, of what we can do with our trash so that our legacy is not just a bunch of plastic and bottles. It really helps provide a way to see your life as connected to everything. And that sounds kind of mystical and dopey and dumb, and I'm sorry about that, but it's really cool to me and I'm really excited about it.
So I was very excited to get the chance to talk to Brent Crampton about ways to bring that to Omaha, and to make it something that everybody can share in — a way to think about how we have a future that's more green, in ways that are easy adaptations we can make. And we can have some fun with it. Maybe your mind can be blown like mine was, right? So here's my conversation with Brent Crampton. Please enjoy, and please consider composting. That's my propaganda for you. Here's the conversation.
An epiphany about waste
Tom: Before we do the life story — composting is kind of this weird thing for me. I don't know if you've listened to any of the previous episodes, but I'm somebody who — I can't remember exactly when it happened, but I feel like when I started to compost and I started to become aware of just the way that things biodegrade, what happens after that, it was kind of a mind-blowing event for me, where it reshaped the way I thought about everything. Once I started thinking about waste, I turned into this kind of annoying person to most of the people around me — because once you make that shift, it's really difficult not to try to tell everybody else, to try to get them on board. Try to tell them to compost, or just to be more conscious of everything in their lives.
So maybe we could start there for you. Was some of your awareness of all those issues — did you grow up with that? Or did you hit some kind of epiphany moment like I did?
Brent: No, I had an epiphany moment — and then I had several epiphanies. And it's funny you use that word "epiphany," because I do a lot of presentations and education stuff, and I tell my journey as this discovery of these epiphanies, using that specific word, because that's really what it feels like.
I've always been, you know, this progressive-leaning kind of guy — "sustainability, yeah, I recycle" — but I didn't really know anything about it, as I came to find out once I got into the industry. For me — I didn't go to school and get a degree in sustainability or anything like that. I grew up here in Omaha, and got a double degree: one in journalism, one in religious studies. But I went off into DJing and event promoting, and owned a nightclub and operated that. In terms of composting and recycling, I just picked up the things you pick up as a normal person that's not really clued into it — which is not a lot, and not a lot of factual stuff.
So when I got into the industry, it was like, bam — same thing: if only people knew this information, they would be compelled to act and change. So I totally relate to that sentiment.
What religious studies taught a future DJ
Tom: So, religious studies — is that what you said you got a degree in?
Brent: Yeah.
Tom: Tell me about that. What were you drawn to in religion? And what was the plan there?
Brent: Well, so — different than theology, or the study of a god — religion was like... I'll give you an example. Imagine college days on campus. You're talking to somebody, and that person is like, "Okay, I've got to go to class." "Where are you going?" "Oh, business calculus" or something or other. And I'm like, "Great — I'm going to go learn about Hinduism. I'm going to go learn about indigenous cultures." For me, it was this process of discovery of the world and the people that we live around, through the experience of religions.
And I loved it, because it was also this process of these epiphanies and discovery. The things that you learn about history and people and religion — how religion played a role in that — it almost felt like the information you're learning is dangerous. Like, this is why they don't teach these things, because if people knew this, man, society would be different. So it was fun for me. It was a process of discovery.
Looking back on it, one could say, "Wow, that was a waste of time, because you don't use any of it." But here's what I found out. Throughout my 20s, when I was enmeshed in nightlife and DJing, the events that I programmed were specifically about bringing different types of people together who normally don't come together, through dance music. We tried to have a very multicultural environment. And one day — I'd long graduated — some current college student came to me and said, "You know, I'm taking a class from a religious studies professor, and she uses you as an example of what you can do with your degree. Because here you are — you learned about pluralism, this idea that people have different ideas and come from different backgrounds, and that's okay, we should be accepting of that — and you took that mode of thinking and flipped it into nightlife. And that was a manifestation of your degree in some way," according to my former professor. So, you know, it's crazy — but there are a lot of different ways it can come into being.
Tom: So did you grow up religious, then?
Brent: I've kind of weaved in and out of that. There was a time in my late high school, early college days where I became a standard form of conservative Christian, and that definitely drew me — once I was in college — to want to know about the meaning of life. So I started taking philosophy classes, and quickly realized that's just, like, mind games for intellectuals. It didn't feel like there was anything redeeming in that. And so then I was like, what about this religion thing? And that's how I went off into that.
But in some ways, studying different religions kind of ruined my conservative bubble — because there's no way you can go through that and have an appreciation and empathy for people from all different walks of life all over the world, and still think that my mode of religion is the one and only way. So that bubble was burst. And then there was this flood of creativity I experienced, because I wasn't confined by these specific parameters anymore. It was like the whole world was open to me now. And there were definitely some creative times that came out of that.
Tom: Well, it seems to be — so you said it was journalism and religion. It's almost like one half of that is trying to figure out how people connect, how culture is established, and sort of, what is everything, right? But then the other side is journalism, which is trying to explain it to people. Did you have those dueling impulses — the curious person, and then also the teacher, the explainer?
Brent: Yeah. Just from an early age I have enjoyed communication, the written word — taking complex ideas and trying to funnel them into simple little modes of information that people can digest and take and act on. And of course, I use a lot of that now: taking complex concepts around recycling and composting, and boiling them down to the simplest form, where people can remove all the barriers that stop them from acting and just go and do it. So it's a transferable skill, evidently — going from event promoter to the sustainability industry, by way of a budding-journalist, religion-degree college student.
From journalism to the dance floor
Tom: Well then, music is almost different — because if journalism is sort of the intellectual outlet, then music is much more, I don't know what exactly to call it, intuitive. There's an emotional draw that people have; there's something kind of instinctual about what we like about music. So it seems very well-rounded — between those three activities, you're trying to find a lot of different ways people connect and grow, right? So how did you go from potentially wanting to be a journalist to DJing?
Brent: Mmm — have you looked at the journalism industry these days?
Tom: So you're like — people will always dance, but they might not always buy the paper.
Brent: Yeah. I mean, even back then — I was in college from 2003 and for the next five years after that — the writing was on the wall. There wasn't a lot going on. But nonetheless, in college — I made the foolish decision, I say that offhandedly, to begin DJing when I was 17 years old. And then I just became enmeshed in it. So as I'm studying in college, at night I'm going out and playing music, and I started getting good at it.
In the beginning, before I was of age to go into the bars where the DJs were playing, I couldn't get access to spaces. So instead of just getting booked to play a bar, I had to create the context — create the space — that I wanted to play in. And that's what got me into producing events. Okay, well, let me just create my own stage — and coffee shops were kind of an avenue for that. At the time it was common to have an acoustic guitar player at the coffee shop, not a DJ. So that was kind of a barrier that I broke. I said, let me come into your place and play music. But just being a DJ playing lounge music in a coffee shop isn't maybe all that interesting — so it's like, okay, let's add a live artist to it. Let's add a live saxophone, a live drummer. And then, let's form a tour around coffee shops. I played all kinds of coffee shops, and then it caught the attention of a journalist at The Reader, who did an article. And that got me into promoter land, where I started getting booked by the people who were booking the bars and things like that.
I kind of had this mantra early on: work with what you got, and work your way up. Which seems like a very conservative, Republican kind of mantra — and I'm not that — but it worked for me at that time. So yeah, I'm studying journalism and religion, but then it just clicked, and I was like: this is where my passion is at, this is where my heart's at, this is where I want to go. And so I took off running.
Building multicultural nightlife in Omaha
Brent: And what I realized in Omaha, Nebraska at the time — this is like 2005, right — is that the rave era had ended. You had people going out and listening to dance music, and they were primarily white, middle-class, post-rave-generation folks. But then I started studying the history of dance music, and I realized: it's really colorful. It's very gay. It's the peoples of the world. And we didn't have that in Omaha. I was like, why can't I do what was happening in places like the Paradise Garage or The Loft in New York in the '70s and '80s, or The Warehouse with Frankie Knuckles in Chicago — just a fraction of whatever that magic was — and bring it to Omaha?
And so we planted ourselves in a Spanish restaurant in Benson, before Benson was what we know now. You're in Benson, right? Your office? It's incredible now, but back then there wasn't a lot going on. We did what we called pop-up events, before "pop-up" was in the vernacular. Once a month, we'd go into this beautiful Spanish restaurant called España — where Au Courant is now — and we would transform it into a nightclub. It was on Thursday nights. That gives you an idea — I'm 36 now; imagine going partying on a Thursday night. That would not happen for me now. But back then, that was the start of the weekend for us. We started doing all these multicultural themes, partnering with people from the Brazilian community, the Jamaican community, having these multicultural events. We did that for five years and it worked out great.
Then we got some capital and opened up our own nightclub, House of Loom, at 10th and Pacific. Did that for five and a half years. And then in 2016, it was just like — hey, our lease is out, we don't feel like we're going to go on, let's close it down. Between the time that we announced it and the time that we closed — December 31st, 2016, New Year's Eve was our last event — Donald Trump got elected. So when January 1st, 2017 came: our nightclub was done, it was the end of an era. My social circle's place of home was gone. For some folks in the artist community, that place was an intersection for a lot of artists in different fields — that was now gone. Our nation was different because of our president, and in some ways our world was different. And for me, that era of "let's get together and let's celebrate and let's party, let's have a good time" was over. It was time to go into our respective corners and get some work done. That was what was on my heart at that time — like, I'm done with this thing, I'm going to move on to this next thing. But I didn't know what that next thing really was.
The dream, the Shabbat dinner, and a job that landed in his lap
Brent: Well, it turns out — in 2015, the year before we announced we were going to close House of Loom, I woke up at three in the morning, in the middle of the night, after having this dream where I envisioned I was part of this process where people were growing things in their front yard. They weren't growing grass — they were growing beautiful vegetables and plants and flowers. And that inspired me. I went online right then, laying in bed in the dark with my laptop, my then-girlfriend — now wife — laying next to me, and I registered a couple of URLs. One was PrairieYardProject.com. I had this idea that I was going to figure out a way to teach people to turn their yards into a prairie and away from green grass — which is a horrible model, but that's for another conversation. As an entrepreneur, I was like: here's an idea. It struck me, boom, like a bolt of inspiration. And I just set it on the shelf.
So now it's 2017. I'm like, what am I going to do? What's my next thing? And I kept going back to that idea I'd set on the shelf, and I was like, let's take it off. I kind of tweaked it, worked on it for a while. But I was like — do I really have the gumption, the energy, to start another business and find capital and work? That first year of having a business, you've got to work your butt off. Now I have a little kid — that chapter was like, no.
So it took about a year. But then I got invited to a Shabbat dinner with a couple of Jewish friends. Randomly — literally ran into her. Her name is Betsy, Betsy Samuelson. She's married to a Jewish farmer, Ben Samuelson, and I ran into them in a grain field in Honey Creek, Iowa. We were like, "Wow, how are you doing?" We started talking, and she invites us over to her house. Several months go by, and we finally come over for dinner. And I kid you not — breaking bread, my first Shabbat dinner ever, as I'm not Jewish, they invited us into their custom — Betsy says, hey, paraphrasing: "I work for this startup named Hillside Solutions. They've done some great stuff. They have the area's only industrial composting facility, and a lot of people don't know about them, but they're ready to take it to the next level. I'm working for them now, but I just finished a degree and I've got to go into that field. Do you want my job?"
I was not expecting that. It just landed in my lap. And after considering it for a long time, I did — I took it. Beginning January 2018, I jumped into this job with Hillside Solutions, which I'm in still to this day. And that's where — kind of like you learned about composting, had an epiphany, you're like, wow, I've got to tell everybody about this — I didn't really know anything about how the recycling and composting world worked. But now I was the guy that was supposed to know and tell everybody else, and sell the product, and build these programs around these services, and make us stand out from billion-dollar multinational competitors who are in our market. So it was like baptism by fire.
And I'll finish this off real quick, seeing as you've got a question. At that point, I felt like I was in college again — because for the first six months of working for this company, I could feel my brain growing again. The information I was learning felt dangerous, in a positive, inspiring way. And now this is what I do: I share that information — which I hope to share with you later in this conversation — all the things that I learned as someone who was a novice, who was well-meaning but didn't know, and what I know now about how this industry works that I want everybody to know. Because we all have to know it, coming into this era where we're going to have to adjust our lifestyles for climate change and create lifestyles around regenerative practices.
Trash is a resource, not waste
Tom: I want to talk about this idea of it feeling dangerous. Is it dangerous in the sense that it threatens some of the status quo, and that in and of itself scares a lot of people? Where does the danger come into it?
Brent: Yeah — the status quo part, right? So, okay. Here I am at the beginning of 2018, and one of the first epiphanies I have: we're acculturated into this idea that trash equals waste. And there's a good reason for this. It's what I call the out-of-sight, out-of-mind theory. Through the course of humanity, at times we've been too close to our waste, and that's caused and spread plagues. Think about the bubonic plague — the Black Plague — in Europe, wiping out millions of people, because folks lived in their trash, and they lived with rats. So we've been taught that we need to have a sense of separation from it for our own survival.
Okay, cool. Now that we've established that, we need to get a few steps closer to it. Because it turns out — what I realized when I learned this — out of all the things that exist, all the animals that exist on this planet, humans are the only ones that create waste. Everything else has figured out how to live a symbiotic life with the planet. It lives what we call a zero-waste lifestyle — except us.
And so what I realized is that the waste we produce is actually a resource. We need to stop calling it trash and start calling it a resource. There's a little pocket of opportunity in all of it — because any time we take a pile of trash and all we do is send it to the landfill and bury it in the ground, it's like taking cash money out of your pocket — not that a lot of people have that anymore — putting it in the ground, burying it, and forgetting about it. It's the equivalent. Because when we flip that stuff and we treat it like a resource, that creates jobs, that creates opportunities, that creates industries, that creates products. It's just way more interesting — and in alignment with America's history of ingenuity — to preserve and conserve that stuff and use it as a resource. That's the first thing I learned that completely blew my mind.
What really happens to food waste in a landfill
Tom: I guess there was some point for me where — I don't know that I'd ever really thought about how long it takes for things to degrade, or biodegrade. And that's just kind of its own moment, when you realize that the permanent legacy of humans is probably just going to be a bunch of trash that we leave on the planet. Humans might go extinct, but the trash will probably outlive the vast majority of everything else that we might achieve here. Once I thought of it in those terms, it just felt to me like such a sad legacy that humans are choosing to leave, as opposed to trying to do something else.
It's one of those things where once you make that shift, once you start to think about the connections — and it seems like you're really interested in the connections, in people, specifically what it is that connects all kinds of different types of people from different walks of life. Music is certainly a way of doing that. But also the way that you think about trash, waste, what can be reused — it's another way of connecting us to every living fiber of everything. That's why I was actually maybe interested when you were talking about how you studied religion — because it seems like you can go back to these old religious notions of the connection that all life has to everything else. And there's certainly a way to embrace that through a lifestyle that tries not to waste anything, that tries to rethink the way that we manufacture, what there is to throw out, what we can do with things that we might traditionally throw out. It changes the whole worldview for everything, right?
Brent: All right, so I'm going to connect the religious studies and what I'm doing now. You know, there's a beginning and an end to everything — this is written in the Bible; this is how we understand our day. There's a beginning and there's an end in our experience with time. But a lot of indigenous cultures have a different view of time and their relationship to the universe — and that is circular systems.
What we have now as the conventional experience with our waste is what we call the take-make-waste model. That's a linear experience. I buy that candy bar compulsively, standing in line at the grocery store; I rip open the package; I throw it in the trash. Done. Okay — it's over, it's out of sight, out of mind, I don't think about it again, it gets buried. Boom. But that take-make-waste, linear process is what's gotten us in trouble. It's easy and convenient and cheap in the beginning, but you're pushing the burden down the road — and here we are now, having to deal with that burden.
Where we're now investing ourselves — what we now know from our Western experience with waste — is that we have to get into circular models, circular modes: treating those things like a resource. We have a version of that with recycling, right? It makes a lot of sense in everybody's mind: humans make things, and we're going to reuse those things. That's recycling. What a lot of people are just now waking up to is how composting relates to that. And that is: nature makes things, and now we're just going to reuse those things. That's what composting is. Most people don't understand that.
And here's the next epiphany — one of the big ones that I realized. If you ask most people what happens to your head of lettuce when it goes to the landfill, they'll probably tell you — well, they don't know, but "maybe it just turns into dirt, no big deal." I've heard many versions of that, and I thought the same thing. But what I discovered is that food waste in a landfill — like a simple, flimsy, innocent head of lettuce — we weaponize it. Because of the way those things are structured (and I'll go into that in a second), it will hang around for, research shows, the next 10 to 25 years, pumping out methane gas, which significantly contributes to climate change; it helps create leachate, which is a toxic sludge that has the potential to make its way into our waterways; and it just takes up space, limiting the lifespan of our landfills.
It comes down to the basic science of the way landfills work, that nobody teaches and nobody talks about. Our trash goes there for the day, and at the end of the day, landfills are required by law to put a layer of fill dirt on top. That's a good idea — you don't want that stuff blowing around in neighboring communities, and smells wafting around, right? But what that does is create what's called an anaerobic environment, which is a fancy way of saying oxygen can't get to our stuff to break it down. Plus, it's usually wrapped in a plastic bag, which isn't going to biodegrade for probably five hundred years. It turns out that anaerobic bacteria thrive in that environment — bacteria that don't need oxygen to live. They come in, they eat away at our food waste for potentially the next two decades, and what they're putting off is methane gas.
People talk about CO2 — that's a big contributor to climate change — but also very important is methane gas. In fact, I've seen stats that 34% of the methane that comes out of America comes from our landfills. And I've also seen stats that methane gas, in its first years, can be many times worse than CO2. It's just one of those things that we don't talk about, that we don't know. And when I found out, I stopped in my tracks and I thought: if other people knew this information, they would be compelled to act and start composting. So that's one of the things I love sharing — and I just want to get that out there to people.
Fighting climate fatalism with action
Tom: An impediment that I run into when I try to convince people to compost, or to be more aware of this, is — we live in a very apocalyptic-feeling time. Like what you were talking about before: Donald Trump gets elected, and I think it had sort of two effects. One was it did motivate a lot of people to get involved who might otherwise not have — I felt the same kind of immediacy. But then you also have people who feel fatalistic, especially with the environment and some of the doom-like projections we get of what things will be like. People just sort of accept: "I don't know if it's going to matter, I don't know if it's worth trying to figure out." They feel pessimistic — like we have 20 years before it's all over anyway, so why should I try? I'm sure you get stuff like that. How do you navigate the doom and apocalyptic attitude we have, while actually trying to make people care and improve things going forward?
Brent: Man, you've just got to hang out with more positive people — or maybe you're around too many evangelists, I don't know. But I actually don't hear that a whole lot. Here's what I hear often: more and more every day, the people that are coming to us, making their way into our inboxes and phone conversations — people believe that climate change increasingly is a threat to existence. And they feel like there's been a lack of leadership in this space. What can the individual do? What can the business do? What can our community do, in that absence?
And that's where we come in, on that community level. We've got stuff you can do today, right now. Go outside and start a compost pile — we can tell you ways to do it with stuff just laying around your house, without spending any money. Or, with a couple clicks of a button, sign up for one of our programs that lets you start bringing it to us, and we'll turn it into soil and give you some of it back. So while we do have to wait on the City of Omaha to negotiate an acceptable contract that includes a reasonable amount of yard waste composting or more — you can do it now. And that's really our vibe: let's not talk about all the bad things that are happening. There are good things happening every single day, and we're a part of that. You want to join the conversation? Let's go.
Composting in Omaha: who's already on board
Tom: Now, the City of Omaha is probably worth talking about, because I've noticed there are certainly a lot of businesses that offer a compost option now — it seems like that's been increasing. I love when I'm able to go to, like, Zen Coffee, and I don't have to throw things out because it's compostable. It's one of those things where once you get used to dividing up what you may have thrown out — before you figured out ways to recycle or compost effectively — it's difficult to switch your mindset back. It feels like there's something immoral about throwing anything out, at a certain point. But Omaha is — I mean, sometimes it takes a while for things to change in Omaha. It takes a while for the city to catch up with some of the attitudes that people are interested in, and it takes a while for people to realize their own interest in some of these proposals. So how do you get Omaha to come on board with the mission you guys have?
Brent: Every day in our city, there's somebody somewhere — on the individual level, or the business and corporate level — saying, "All right, we're ready to do something. What can we do?" And that's the point where we intersect with people. I'm not interested in talking to someone and trying to convince them that change needs to happen — that's a different process. We're just trying to meet the growing need, and a growing sense of urgency, from the people that do understand something needs to change and are ready to take action, but just need a little bit of direction — or that infrastructure.
Zen Coffee — how they offer composting to their customers? That infrastructure is us. We do that. When it comes to small local businesses, we work with Archetype Coffee, Coneflower Creamery, Au Courant, Wally's, Amateur Coffee, Modern Love, Le Bouillon, Kitchen Table, The Switch Beer & Food Hall, Urban Village, Block 16, Lola's, Noli's, Kitchen Council. And then there's big hitters — like Creighton University: we're taking 8,000 pounds of compostables from them a month, and that's about to grow. We're working with UNO and UNMC and Mutual of Omaha, and more. I mean, anything from world-class corporate offices where huge decisions are made — like the C-suites of HDR composting their paper towels — to the mom-and-pop shops, taking pizza crusts from Noli's in Blackstone. We've got it, and we're building that infrastructure out every day.
Recycling myths and the limits of single-use
Tom: Is there a future where you can eliminate landfills? Or are they a permanent fixture in human societies?
Brent: That's a good question. I think some things do need to get thrown away in a landfill — they serve an appropriate need. Medical waste, for example: it's got to go somewhere. But we've made that the default rather than the exception. What we're going to have to do over the next five to ten years is basically flip that equation and usher in a new era. And that takes a lot of strategic rethinking of how our systems are set up.
That brings me to one of the other major epiphanies I came across. I used to think — and I've come across a lot of other people that think this too — that when you recycle, it absolves your consumption. Which is a way of saying: "I love drinking out of water bottles, with the convenience or whatever, and it's okay that I drink water from water bottles, because I'm going to recycle them. So it's a net even, right?" Wrong. This is something I just didn't know about the inner workings, the background, of recycling: there's the upstream and downstream waste problem when it comes to the single-use items that we have. Even though you recycle that water bottle, it took an exponential amount of energy and water and resources just to create it and get it to your hand. And then, at the end of the day, in the current state of recycling — there's some changes coming — that water bottle can't be turned into another water bottle. Plastic, in its current conventional state, doesn't work like that. It's like re-saving a JPEG over and over again: it gets downgraded in quality each time. So that water bottle probably becomes something like Saran Wrap, which is not a recyclable thing — unless you use the EnergyBag, and that's a whole other conversation.
Luckily, there are things like aluminum that can be recycled an infinite amount of times. So just so you know — if you have to choose between a plastic water bottle and the can option, always go for the can. That's the better one.
And so now a lot of restaurants have pivoted to compostable serviceware. That's great — you're growing out of Styrofoam takeout boxes, or plastic forks, things like that. That's a good step, now using compostable stuff. But what we see happen is that not a lot of restaurants are actually making sure — or equipping the consumer to know — that that has to go into an industrial composting stream, which maybe I'll talk about in a little bit. Even the compostable serviceware takes a lot of energy to make.
The way I view what we're going through right now, in terms of our climate crisis: imagine it as reading a novel, and we're just going to flip to the last chapter. Okay — how does this whole thing end? I have to know. The story doesn't go, "and everybody recycled and composted everything." No. It says: "and everybody reduced the amount of waste that they consumed; they reused the things that they could; they refused the things that they didn't need; they rethought entire systems to not create waste in the first place." That's really how this ends — when it comes to sustainability within the solid waste conversation, that's how the story ends: reducing, reusing, rethinking. And will there be a landfill somewhere in that? Oh, I'm sure. But businesses are signing on board, families and households are signing on board for zero-waste lifestyles — to be more in sync with every other creature on the planet. That's really where we're going to head in the next couple decades.
Industrial composting vs. your backyard pile
Tom: Okay, so you mentioned it — let's try to talk about the different types of composting. So, industrial composting: what is the distinction? I might guess — and I know I've seen it, but I don't actually know exactly — it has to do with the temperature it can reach, right?
Brent: Yeah. So I'm glad you brought this up, because there's a lot of confusion around this. If people do know about composting at home, what we know is the big three that you can compost safely and easily at home: your yard waste, your vegetable scraps, your fruit scraps. You can do some more stuff, but that's the main gist. When we jump up to industrial composting, it's a whole different game. Because of the intensity of the process, we can take all pre- and post-consumer food waste — including meat, dairy, bones — things that you'd get into some trouble with if you put them in your home compost pile, like a T-bone. We can take that.
Take the restaurant industry. After 2018, plastic straws got beat up in the media narrative, and they said: all right, let's go to paper straws. Okay, let's also get rid of other single-use plastics and Styrofoam, and let's start using compostable stuff. That's where the story ended for a lot of restaurants. But it turns out they didn't go far enough — because if that compostable packaging, that compostable fork, that compostable cup don't make it to a facility like ours that can break them down: if they go in recycling, it's considered contamination, and it actually costs the recycling facility money to pull it out of the stream. If it goes to a landfill, we now know — like the head of lettuce — it's going to put off methane gas for the next couple decades. So it doesn't belong there. It has to go to our facility. And we have the capacity to break that stuff down.
And here's the cool thing: in our sustainable future, you have to imagine the adjustments we're going to make in society. One of them is that every major community and town is going to have an industrial composting facility nearby. And the good news is that the greater Omaha area already has one. My company, Hillside Solutions — our affiliate, Soil Dynamics — we have a composting farm in Ashland, Nebraska. We work with schools, taking lunch waste and their paper food trays and napkins. We work with the City of Bellevue — we take their residential yard waste. We work with the zoo, taking animal manure. We work with a variety of restaurants and institutions and organizations, taking paper towels, compostable serviceware that's now flooding the market, any and all food — all kinds of things. If nature made it, you can generally compost it in the industrial setting. So it's a whole different ballpark — and a necessary component to having a sustainable infrastructure for any community.
Rethinking the great American lawn
Tom: Now, you talked a little bit about lawns. You said we might not have time to get into the whole issue of green grass and the way people use the land that they have, but I do want to get into it a little bit — maybe we could do an abbreviated version. Lawns are another thing where it becomes this sort of slippery slope. Going from composting, for me, led to just being more aware of my interaction with what's natural and what's unnatural — thinking about yards, thinking about animals in the yards, and all of that. I've become obsessed with reducing grass, and I'm interested in the legal possibilities of rewilding wherever that's possible. So what is your relationship with the lawn, and what do you think people should be doing with the land they have?
Brent: You mentioned you got into composting and then you went down the rabbit hole. I think, in the conversation of sustainability that society is having, the entry point for a lot of people was in 2018, with plastic straws. Is getting rid of plastic straws that big of a deal in the scheme of things? Not really — but it was a gateway for people to start considering the role of single-use plastics, and how we needed to transition.
It's my sense that as people go further down that rabbit hole, they're going to get past the obvious things and start looking at all the other facets of their lifestyle. And eventually, our focus is going to gaze upon our lawns. We're going to start questioning: where did this concept of green, manicured, perfect, chemically-coated grass — that takes a fossil-fuel-burning instrument to keep in check — come from? And it turns out it came from France and European royalty. Somehow we took this to be the cream of the crop of suburban living, having a wonderful green grass lawn — and now it's assumed that everybody has to do this. It's this ridiculous, asinine concept, and we have to let go of it. We've got to transition out of it. Because from an ecological perspective, it's basically a desert. Animals can't thrive in it; not a lot of bugs and things like that can thrive in those things — and especially if you're splashing it with chemicals? Good Lord. Good luck.
It's a perfect opportunity to grow things that are going to bring in the bees, bring in butterflies, bring in critters that are going to bring in the hawks — and basically rebuild our ecosystem, right in your front and back yard. Not to mention: start growing food. So the next time something happens in society, and all of a sudden we're in a pandemic and we're questioning where we're going to get our next meal, whether the grocery store is going to have stuff on its shelves — you don't have to worry, because you've got a meal right in your front or back yard. It's just wasted — a missed opportunity — covering our lawns in green grass.
Tom: Well, grass is one of those things where I don't think people can intellectualize what it is they like about it, other than it seems normal, and maybe it's an element of status. We're just used to it, right? It's weird to argue against it, because I don't think people can really tell you what's good about it. Other than the perceived aesthetic, there's not really an argument for grass.
Brent: That's right. I think people kind of overhype the idea of, "well, I'm going to use it with my family." It's like — how often do you actually get out in your front lawn with your family playing ball? Does that actually happen? But the animals will take it over, because they'll use it every day.
But yeah — so that's the diatribe on the green grass stuff. But it relates to what's going on right now in the City of Omaha. We've just committed ourselves to a 10-to-20-year residential contract where, for a short window in the spring and the fall, they're going to do limited yard waste collection — and all other times, it's going to have to go to the landfill, where it's going to produce methane gas. Not an ideal situation, and it's really a missed opportunity for the city to move in the right direction on sustainability. Our policy now points us in the opposite direction.
While we're debating this — let's just stop for a second and question the premise. What are you putting in that bag on the curb? Are you bagging your grass clippings and trying to send them to the landfill? Why are you doing that? That's food for your lawn. Your lawn needs those grass clippings — it'll thrive. Leave it there. And speaking of leaves — everyone's raking them up right now, at the time of us recording this. Why? Just mow that, and mulch it into your lawn. That is food for your lawn. There's no reason to bag it up — wasting that time, having to buy those bags — and then send it to the landfill to put off methane gas. Again, it goes back to these structures that we're acculturated into. The sustainability conversation — the circular conversation — is now making us stop and say: wait, let me question that. Is there a different way I can do this? And there is. And the answer is generally cheaper than what we're usually doing, and just more interesting.
What Hillside Solutions offers
Tom: So as we wrap up here, tell me — for someone who's maybe just joining us — what are the services that Hillside offers, and what should people be considering maybe adding to their lifestyle?
Brent: Yeah. So you can think of Hillside like a trash hauling company — but the difference between us and the average one is that we want to do everything with your trash other than putting it in the landfill. So: whatever options between recycling and composting are there. We're working with businesses, as well as — through our affiliates — with homes, helping people separate their waste in upwards of six different ways, to send it places to be treated as a resource. And we work with a lot of businesses who have sustainability goals — it's more common now for a business to have a zero-waste goal, or to go carbon-neutral by such-and-such a date. In order to do that, you need to get into some robust recycling and composting services. So we help people meet their sustainability goals through that.
And then the other thing — as a listener: we have this program called Compost Club. It's a way for residential people to connect to our industrial composting facility. You sign up, and you gain access to a network of drop-off sites around the city. We take that stuff and turn it into soil, and you have the opportunity to get some of that soil back — or we create the opportunity for you to donate it to local food gardens in the spring. All of that is at hillside.solutions/compostclub — to sign up for that.
Tom: Right on. Well, I'm glad I got the chance to talk to you and learn a little bit about this. As I've said before, I'm just a freak about going down these rabbit holes and trying to figure out how I can transform my life. And I hope you've inspired some people to at least look at the rabbit hole, whether they're ready to jump into it or not. So thank you for talking to me today.
Brent: Wonderful. Appreciate the opportunity, man.
Tom: Riverside Chats is produced in conjunction with KIOS and Exorbitant Creative. You can find our backlog wherever you get podcasts. Original music is written and performed by The Real Zebos. We'll be back next week. I'm Tom Knoblauch — and thank you for listening.