AUBURN — A Portland-based food-waste composter hopes to expand its business to the Twin Cities now that the company has moved part of its operation to Auburn.
Brett Richardson, general manager at We Compost It, said the company already has agreements to begin collecting scraps from St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center and Rails restaurant in Lewiston. More deals are planned.
“We’ve just started doing sales now,” Richardson said. “We had to get our land permitted and our truck ready. So the timing is great now to move up that way and to bring our solution up to the second-largest metropolitan area in Maine.”
The company collects compost-able food at schools , restaurants, hospitals and other businesses in Portland and Freeport.
“We really would like to be the organic food-waste solution for the state of Maine and beyond,” Richardson said.
The material is taken to the Auburn location and composted. The final product is sold in bulk.
“We collect from corner coffee shops to restaurants and up to large institutions like St. Mary’s,” Richard said. “We sell our compost by the yard. It’s a terrific way to close the loop, from the restaurants and then back into the general public.”
The company began operating in 2011 as Resurgam, and had its composting operation on three acres off Portland’s Riverside Street.
The new facility, off Hardscrabble Road near the Poland town line, is 10 acres. That gives the company room to process 1,000 tons of organic compost per month under covered buildings.
“It gives us room to grow and expand,” he said. “A big part of composting commercially is doing it in a way that is environmentally friendly and by being a good neighbor. We’ve made a lot of investments to have a state-of-the-art facility that lets us do that.”
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