COLUMBIA FALLS – Standing in the shell of a gravel pit, surrounded by detritus from lawns, piles of sawdust, a few choice lumps of cow manure, hay bales and an electric fence, Alissa LaChance and Rachel Gerber truly understand that age-old adage about one person’s trash being another’s treasure.
The trick of turning garbage into gold is time, and largely staying out of nature’s way. LaChance and Gerber are the proprietors of DIRT Rich, a new composting and pick-up service based in Columbia Falls.
In the piles at the bottom of the pit, the smell of organic decomposition means the microbes, insects, and fungi – nature’s little helpers – are getting to work breaking down the organic matter. The result is a compost mixture full of the natural elements needed to replenish soil and grow better plants.
It’s nature’s way of recycling, Gerber said, which is an easy way to think about DIRT Rich’s endeavor. The idea behind it is simple: When we pull food from the Earth, we take with it all the nutrients it needed to grow. So if we don’t eat that food, we can let it decompose back to a more basic state, to then nurture the soil.
Composting is the next logical step in the farm-to-table movement, she said.
“The farm-to-fork movement is so huge right now, and it’s catching on here,” Gerber said. “This is the scraps-to-soil part.”
Adding another step to a culture focusing on the importance of local food made sense to Gerber and LaChance, and they opened DIRT Rich in mid-July, armed with a Ford F-550 truck to help haul food scraps.
Their first customer was Xanterra, the concessionaire running the lodges and restaurants in Glacier National Park. From July until just this week, DIRT Rich managed to collect 21 tons of food scraps from restaurants at Rising Sun, the Many Glacier Hotel, Swiftcurrent, Jammer Joes, and the Lake McDonald Lodge.
Rising Sun closed early in the season due to the wildfire that plagued East Glacier this summer, so the bulk of the 21 tons came from just four restaurants.
Now that they have their system in place, Gerber and LaChance are hoping to include more restaurants on their pick-up schedules, places that would prefer to keep as much refuse out of the landfill as possible.
They’re also opening up the service to home pickup in Columbia Falls and Whitefish, giving customers a five-gallon bucket with a new compostable bag each week and then picking that bucket up for the customer, for $20 each month. Commercial prices would vary, depending on sheer amount, Gerber said.
A big part of participation in these cases is training people to become consistent with their scraps, the way recycling programs try to get people into a habit, like taking out the garbage.
“I think people want to make responsible decisions with their food waste,” LaChance said. “But the infrastructure wasn’t in place. It’s just way easier to throw it away.”
Friends since their Whitefish childhoods, LaChance, 25, and Gerber, 25, decided to pursue DIRT Rich full time after Gerber’s personal efforts to collect residential food scraps from friends and others in Whitefish started to catch on.
Gerber pulls on her experience of nine years in the restaurant industry and five years working on a farm, while LaChance brings a background with an environmental studies degree, focused on sustainable agriculture.
Not only does DIRT Rich take food scraps, but lawn cuttings – including branches – manure, leaves, sawdust, moldy hay, and other organic material that would otherwise end up incinerated or trashed.
Now detritus is recycled into compost, which Gerber and LaChance expect will be ready in the spring and available for purchase. They could make it available sooner, but that would mean speeding up the curing process, which would make the compost less rich and effective, they said.
Anyone seeking to drop off their yard waste can call DIRT Rich for the access code to the gate on their 200-feet-by-270-feet compost yard, thereby avoiding people who would seek to merely dump their trash.
At this point, the business model has worked, LaChance and Gerber said.
“So far it’s been really awesome,” Gerber said.
For more information on DIRT Rich, call 406-212-7535 or visit the Facebook page.