We have just learned about an innovative nutrient-cycling enterprise operating in Maine and Massachusetts, USA. Called Garbage to Garden, this for-profit social enterprise creates multiple benefits for farmers, over 10,000 families, and taxpayers. It adds scale, efficiency, and economics to the process of household garbage disposal, composting, and garden management.
Once per week, residents who subscribe to the service place a bucket of organic garbage (such as food and veggie waste) on the curb outside their home. 
A Garbage to Garden truck drives by and swaps the bucket for a clean one, and provides a bag of fresh compost if the subscriber has requested it. Specially branded Garbage to Garden compost buckets are available at many retail shops, such as Now You’re Cooking on Front Street in the town of Bath.
The wastes Garbage to Garden collects from many towns are the delivered to a central composting site, at Benson Farm in the town of Gorham. The farm is paid to process the materials, and a portion of the finished compost is purchased back by Garbage to Garden to deliver to the subscribers during the next weekly bucket swap.
While the household program actually uses just a small portion of the compost produced at Benson Farm, it provides a key incentive for home-gardening residents to join the program. The rest of the compost is sold to local farms and garden centers.
In addition to food waste Garbage to Garden also collects used cooking oil, which the company Maine Standard Biofuels turns into biofuel and soap — the same soap Garbage to Garden then purchases and uses to wash their compost buckets!
The many social and economic values (#NutrientValueChains) fueling this enterprise include: reducing volume of waste in landfills, reducing related greenhouse gas emissions, providing valuable compost to farms, improving nutritional quality of garden and farm soils, reducing household garbage disposal costs, connecting urban residents with tangible nutrient-nutrition-nourishment cycles, and education through school programs for engaging children in both the science and economics of Nourishment Economies.
Garbage to Garden employs twenty full-time and eighteen part-time and seasonal staff. A volunteer program enables residents to help with sponsored community events or at Garbage to Garden’s headquarters in the city of Portland, receiving free services in the process. Garbage to Garden is fully funded by the monthly fees paid by subscribers.
This innovative nutrient-cycling business celebrated its 6th anniversary in 2018. It also won the recent Greenlight Maine prize, which should assist further in its growth.