My name is Rian.
In my community I'm better known as the compost man.
This is compost.
It was once sloppy Joes and soggy French toast sticks.
This is my 3rd grade Principal in the background.
And I spent a little bit too much time in his office as a kid growing up.
These kids are for the first time seeing the fruits of their labor.
They've spent a whole year teaching their fellow students
how to separate their food waste.
This is their a-ha! moment.
This is where they realize everything comes full circle.
My a-ha! moment came when I moved to San Francisco in 2007
and studied permaculture.
Permaculture, at the root of the word is permanent agriculture.
It's a designed system that creates no waste
because it views it as a resource.
In that course, the thing that stuck with me most
is that we had to keep a journal.
In that journal, we were supposed to record what we did on a daily basis.
Did we drive to work?
What food did we eat?
What kind of toilet paper did we buy?
It made you hyper-focused on what you did.
What it did was it gave you the ability to see
how much of an impact, whether positive or negative,
you were having on the environment on a daily basis.
And then I was changed.
Like everyone who took the course you now had these permi-lenses.
You are now looking at the world in a different way.
I immediately started to make small changes in my life.
I sold my car, started commuting 14 miles a day by bike,
I started composting, I started my first garden.
They were both miserable failures at my first attempts.
My compost was more like soup.
I've come a long way.
But what that did was it inspired us
to make these small changes on a daily basis
and realize that this would definitely add up over time.
On top of this, this was a community in San Francisco
that embraced this type of mindset.
In San Francisco there is this little organic hot dog joint called "Underdog"
out in the Outer Sunset of San Francisco.
I'll never forget a day I went there and watched a child;
a little girl teach her parents to sort out their waste.
There was a station with three bins.
I had never seen this three-bin concept coming from New England.
There was a compost, recycling, and landfill option.
What was amazing about this establishment is that the owners, Max and Reeza
also only gave their customers compostable ware.
And at that point I had no clue what that meant.
All their utensils: their forks, knives, spoons
were all made from corn and potato starch,
and everything they gave their customers was either reusable or compostable.
So they really generated no waste and it was an amazing first thing for me to see.
What was also amazing was in San Francisco
they had the option for you to push your organics or your food waste curbside.
They took meat, dairy, bones, and all your yard trimmings.
I had never seen that before, and it really just blew my mind.
And I also at the end of this said,
"Why the hell aren't we doing this everywhere?"
This is ridiculous. We should be doing this everywhere.
This is so great!
When I cam home, I had these permi-lenses on.
The first job I got was at a little local cafe.
And when you have these lenses on, you never see the world the same.
I started to look at little things at this cafe
we could do to lessen our impact.
One thing we noticed
when we started studying
the way our customers interacted in the space
was that there's a counter that the customers,
after they got their sandwich would walk to.
And you just watch people, almost like a robot
just throwing forks, knives, spoons, salt and pepper into a bag
then walking out the door.
And you just sit back and say,
"Man, I would really love to see that person eat a sandwich with a spoon.
That would be something else.
I have no idea why they just grabbed all those things."
And what you start to realize is that people have these habits
where they just automatically do things.
So we started to change that by first, taking away the plastic utensils;
putting them behind the counter.
And if they wanted them they could have them.
We weren't saying, "You can't ever use this again."
Also training the staff to say, "Is that for here or to go?"
It's a really simple question, but it's powerful.
It's either a mug or a paper cup with a lid on it.
Do you really need a bag to carry your sandwich,
which is already wrapped across the street?
No, you really don't.
So you get people thinking about that,
and what we started to do is really lessen the impact
of the source of the waste, which was us.
And also retrain the people coming in, our customers,
to then also think about what they were creating.
With that, we started saving hundreds of dollars every month.
On top of that, we were purchasing in bulk,
so we had less little packages of things.
We stopped dumping out gallons of milk, like the old manager was doing
because the [part] was set properly.
And I was able to then,
- because I'm geeking out hard on this permaculture thing -
go to my owner and say,
"Hey, we're saving money, can we try to attempt this compost thing?"
And at this time, nobody in Portsmouth was composting.
As soon as we started that, we started diverting
90% or greater of our total waste from the landfill.
That was between composting and recycling.
We were now taking our garbage out once every two weeks. That was it.
So with this process, I also realized
there was a greater community need
for this service of compost hauling.
So we started Mr. Fox composting.
We started out with a pick-up truck and a dump trailer.
And it was a labor of love, let me tell you.
Two guys lugging 30 pound bags of compost in the back of a trailer.
We didn't have the Yankee ingenuity to have a tipper to tip the cart.
We were doing it all by hand.
And it quickly grew.
Now, we've got over 100 commercial businesses.
We've got 15 schools, we've got nursing homes, hospitals, restaurants, and cafes.
We have several hundred residents we work with.
We also have municipal projects,
where we have residents bring their food scraps to the municipalities.
At the transfer station, we pick that up,
and we charge less of a tipping fee.
These municipalities are now saving money.
The biggest part about this, and one of the reasons why I started this company
was that ripple effect though.
Everyone at these businesses goes to work on a daily basis,
and they start this process.
And they're going to go home after work, or after school, and say,
why aren't we doing this at home?
Why aren't we doing this at school?
So you have that ripple effect that the students
and these people in these restaurants that have been trained
will never look at the world the same.
They'll always question, "Why aren't we composting?
This makes sense."
So this is how we do it.
I'm glad the winter is over,
but that left, top picture is the vehicle we use.
It gets double the MPGs that most garbage trucks do.
And it's a clean diesel, so you'll never see black emissions
coming out of that exhaust pipe on this truck.
It's taken to our facility.
We combine it with a carbon source, mainly leaf waste.
And we put it through a mixer that was made by a local company.
And then the magic happens.
Most people will ask us how compost works.
They say, "Do you add an outside heating element?
Is it the sun?"
No, it's microbes.
And I get excited about this.
When I do talks, we say, "This is Mrs. and Mr. PacMan doing work.
They're going to town."
I went to compost school.
There is such a thing.
(Laughter)
The thing that stuck with me most was, as a composter,
you're creating an environment conducive for microbes to thrive.
After I heard that, I was like "OK, I get it now. This makes sense."
You're an alchemist.
You need the right amount of carbon; which is the dead brown stuff.
The right amount of nitrogen, which is the live green stuff.
The right amount of oxygen,
and the right amount of moisture, like a wrung out sponge.
When you do that you create an environment for these microbes to thrive.
When those microbes thrive, they create so much heat in that pile
that they are breaking down compostable ware which is made from corn.
They're able to kill off pathogens and bad bacteria
found in meats, dairy, and bones, and cooked things;
the things you can't compost in your backyard.
You're not really supposed to,
unless you want a neighborhood pest-fest going on.
This is what a load looks like from 14 grocery stores.
This is 28,000 pounds.
These loads are different from the loads we collect from the restaurants.
These loads are beautiful.
And this is me geeking out on compost, but this could be eaten.
You could grab a melon out of this pile, cut it open and eat it.
There's a major issue in this country with waste, at the source.
We're creating too much of it.
40% of all food is wasted.
That's ridiculous!
This is beautiful stuff, coming from grocery stores
that maybe didn't look so good.
or because of legal reasons isn't getting into peoples' mouths.
We need to change that.
The alternative for food waste
if it's not ending up in a compost facility, is the landfill.
60% of waste goes to the landfill
and accounts for 20% of overall methane emissions.
Methane is 22 times more potent than CO2.
I show this picture to kids,
and I ask them to give me one word that describes how it makes them feel.
And I hear "sick."
Disgusted.
Sad.
Wasteful.
And powerless.
We need to change that.
This is my high school principal beaming with pride.
This is part of my journey.
But this is their compost.
This is one of many of their a-ha! moments.
I can give them their permi-lenses,
and I can help them plant the seeds of change,
and together, we can help solve this problem.
Thank you.
(Applause)