Top: Compost bays at Bennett Compost with Tim Bennett and Jennifer Mastalerz (circle). Photos by Albert Yee Photography and Nora Goldstein

Nora Goldstein

Bennett Compost, a food scraps collection and composting company in Philadelphia, was started in 2009 by Tim Bennett with $100 and three small collection bins. At the time, Bennett was working at a Small Business Development Center in Philadelphia. He had always wanted to divert his food scraps to composting, but collection wasn’t offered to city residents. Given his profession, Bennett decided to try entrepreneurship himself, and created a food scraps collection enterprise. “I had no idea how the service would catch on, but gave it a shot,” he recalls. “For the first 11 months or so, I would rent a pickup truck from Philly Car Share, and do the collections before and after work. About a year after starting, I left my job, bought a van, and became a full-fledged small business owner.”

Originally, Bennett Compost used a network of community gardens in Philadelphia to compost collected organics. It would build and maintain the bins, and give the gardens a portion of the finished compost. Residents near some of the community gardens would bring their food scraps to be composted. To consolidate its composting operation, the company decided to rent space and build a small aerated static pile (ASP) composting site. “There is a concrete pad, and we have a couple thousand square feet for our operations,” said Bennett in a 2016 BioCycle article. “We purchased a Toro stand-behind mini skid steer loader to manage the piles, and rented a portable screen as needed to process the finished compost for sale and to distribute to our residential customers.”

Bicycle collection service is ideally suited to Philadelphia’s many flat, narrow streets. Photo by Albert Yee Photography

Because the site only had capacity to process 5 tons/week using aerated static piles, Bennett Compost partnered with two other sites in the area to process the remaining material (about 15 tons/week at the time). In 2018, Jennifer Mastalerz joined Bennett Compost as a co-owner. Mastalerz had launched City Sprouts in May 2014, after her employer, Philly Compost, decided to stop its organics collection service in Philadelphia. City Sprout’s operation included a community composting site, which Mastalerz managed, and a bicycle-powered food scraps collection service for neighborhood businesses. In 2016, City Sprouts acquired a tricycle for its commercial organics collection route, and started to collaborate with vehicle-based food scraps collection services who had difficulty accessing some of the city’s narrow streets. “Jen got in touch after the tricycle was ordered to see if Bennett Compost would be interested in using City Sprouts to offer residential food scraps collection in its neighborhood,” says Bennett. “We agreed to give it a try. It allowed us to add customers without procuring an additional vehicle.”

New Processing Capacity

In November 2020, Bennett Compost signed a long-term contract with the City of Philadelphia Parks and Recreation Department (Parks & Rec) to locate its composting operation at a Parks & Rec maintenance facility on Rising Sun Avenue in northeast Philadelphia. The initial term of the contract was one year, with the option to extend the term by up to three additional one-year terms. In 2024 Philadelphia City Council approved an extension to this contract, allowing for additional renewal terms, extending the contract for up to 10 years total. Under the contract, Bennett Compost collects and composts food waste from city facilities, including the Recreation Centers (Rec Centers) and some older adult centers operated by the Parks & Rec Department.

“The Recreation Centers provide after school youth programs and summer camps,” explains Natalie Walker, the Parks & Rec Department’s Sustainability Director. “They are the second largest youth meal providers after the school district, serving over 2 million meals annually. As of now, pickups are being made at more than 100 of the city’s Rec Centers; over the next five years, the project will expand to include the remaining Rec Centers with food programs, up to 150. Bennett Compost receives about 10 lbs/week of food waste from each Rec Center serviced. Five-gallon buckets are used for collection.

Through a $90,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the city is also working to educate children at those Rec Centers about composting and the food system. As part of the agreement, Parks & Rec will receive 75 cubic yards of finished compost each spring from Bennett Compost to distribute among its network of community gardens and orchards.

Many of the capital improvements to the site were covered by a grant to Philadelphia Parks & Rec from the U.S. EPA. “Funds were used for fence work and installing asphalt on a portion of the site that was previously pervious,” says Mastalerz. Bennett Compost purchased concrete blocks to build the composting bays and also upgraded from a ride-on skid steer to a small bucket loader.

Incoming food waste is amended with animal bedding (foreground), leaf mulch (center), and wood chips from tree trimmers (back). Photo by Nora Goldstein

Composting operations couldn’t get underway until Philadelphia Parks & Rec received a long-awaited small-scale food waste composting permit from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP). The new permit tier — the General Permit WMGMO17 (G17) for Source Separated Composting — was several years in the making, and became available in September 2022. The permit creates a pathway for smaller scale food waste composting facilities, both on and off the farm. Approval to operate under this general permit is limited to facilities which meet these criteria:

• Does not exceed five acres for on-farm composting, or two acres for non-farm, small scale composting.
• Does not store more than 500 tons or 1,000 cubic yards/year of source separated food scraps, defined as pre and postconsumer food wastes that are separated from municipal waste at the point of origin for the purpose of recycling and composting.
• Does not store more than 3,000 cubic yards/acre of total materials at any one time.

Allowed organic waste streams accepted for non-farm, small-scale composting facilities are nonliquid waste and limited to yard trimmings and source separated pre and postconsumer food waste. Incoming food waste must be incorporated into the composting process, or in vessels, including worm or larvae feeding vessels, within 24 hours of receipt of the food waste at the facility. Incorporation of all other materials must occur within one week of receipt, unless otherwise approved by PADEP. The G-17 permit requires use of windrows, aerated static piles (ASP), or in-vessel methods for composting. Active piles must be tarped and meet PFRP (pathogen reduction) requirements. Finished compost has to be cured for a minimum of 30 days.

“Essentially, the quantities of feedstocks allowed translate into managing 500 tons of food waste and 2,000 tons of total material a year,” notes Mastalerz. “We are currently processing about half that amount, primarily because of what the site’s footprint can accommodate.”

Multifaceted Operations

Five-gallon buckets are used for residential and Parks & Rec Center food waste collection.

The company collects food scraps from about 6,000 households and 125 commercial businesses in Philadelphia. Households pay a subscription fee of $21/month for weekly 5-gallon bucket collection and receive two free bags of compost a year. All food scraps are accepted. Bicycles are used for collection in the high density and relatively flat sections of Philadelphia — about 15 routes in total. Vans and trucks service customers in other areas. Bennett Compost established several transfer sites that are more centrally located to its routes to facilitate collection efficiency. The sites are equipped with roll-off containers that are pulled twice a week.

Between its residential and commercial accounts, Bennett Compost collects about 2,000 tons/year of food waste. “What we can’t process at our facility is collected twice a week by Ned Foley of American Biosoils and Compost, which has a composting operation about 30 miles away in Skippack (PA),” says Bennett. “Ned keeps a roll-off at our site and pulls it once a week.”

Feedstocks are mixed in the first bay (in foreground), then moved to primary aeration bays (in background) where the piles are covered with screened overs and a tarp. Photo by Nora Goldstein

The composting site loops around the building perimeter. Incoming food waste is mixed with wood chips from tree trimmers and bedding from the Philadelphia Zoo. Partially composted leaves (leaf mulch) also are blended in as needed. Feedstocks are mixed in the first bay, then moved to a primary aeration bay where the pile is covered with screened overs and a tarp. In between the mixing bay and the active composting bay is a wash area for the carts and 5-gallon buckets. All of the wastewater is captured and some is recycled into the piles.

Finished compost is screened (top) using a DeSite vibratory deck screener with a half-inch mesh. Bagged compost (bottom) is sold in reusable 5-gallon sand bags. Photos by Albert Yee Photography and Nora Goldstein

After four weeks of active composting, material in two of the primary bays is combined and put into one of the secondary bays, under aeration, for an additional six weeks. The compost is then screened using a DeSite vibratory deck screener with a half-inch mesh. After screening, material gets moved to a curing pile where it cures for one to two months. Compost is sold in reusable 5-gallon sand bags (retail price is $10/bag) or sold in bulk. It is also distributed to community gardens through the Farm Philly Garden program.

A vermicomposting unit inside the building processes partially finished compost that has been through pathogen reduction in the aerated static pile system. Photos by Nora Goldstein

Bennett Compost has a Wormgear CFT vermicomposting unit inside its building. “The worms are fed partially finished compost that has already been through PFRP in our aerated static pile system,” explains Mastalerz. “The vermicompost is used in soil blends and packaged by itself in 2-lb bags ($8/bag).” In 2024, the company collaborated with the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and OLIN Labs to make an engineered green infrastructure soil — Circular Soil — out of recycled crushed glass (to replace sand), compost and other ingredients. Bennett Compost makes the soil blend which is being used for street tree planting on the UPenn campus.

Bennett Compost has been collaborating with OLIN Labs and the University of Pennsylvania to make an engineered soil blend (above) with recycled crushed glass. Photos by Albert Yee Photography

In addition to operating its own facility, Bennett Compost has a contract to manage the Philadelphia Department of Prisons’ (PDP) composting operation that processes food scraps from internal operations, including about 5,000 inmates. The site had grown to service a population of about 10,000 incarcerated people before the pandemic, and so it now has capacity to manage more food waste than is produced by the complex. “We recently were awarded a G-17 Source Separated Composting permit,” says Laura Cassidy, Sustainability Manager at the PDP. “This means we will now be able to accept food waste from the surrounding community and the schools. We expect to be setting up drop-off locations and procedures this coming spring.”

PDP also restarted its job training program at the complex, which includes the composting site and horticultural operations at the prison complex. Bennett began managing PDP’s greenhouse and orchard operations in 2022. Over one-quarter of Bennett Compost’s 25-full-time employee workforce are formerly incarcerated people.

A more recent initiative is testing four composting pilot programs in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, in collaboration with the New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC). The goal of the project is to build upon the existing success and infrastructure of Bennett Compost, the unique community partnerships of NKCDC and develop successful models for composting food waste. Previous work that Bennett Compost has completed suggests that the lack of success in these areas has less to do with the desire of residents to compost food waste and more to do with barriers of a fee-for-service model, including costs and lack of outreach and education. “This initiative is identifying the best strategies to bridge these barriers and to make composting accessible to residents of Kensington,” notes Bennett. “We’ll then apply the lessons learned to similar communities.”