Chattanoogans Normand Lavoie and Michael Ryan aim to make composting food waste as easy as taking out the trash for area businesses and residents with a new business known as NewTerra, which they say is the only local company that composts food scraps.
While spending 12 years working in the food industry, Ryan saw firsthand how much food waste restaurants were sending to landfills. When he came to the realization that food sent to landfills wasn’t disintegrating – but wrapped in plastic and left to rot, producing methane gas and contributing to global warming – he wanted to help find a solution on a wider scale than just composting his household food waste.
He teamed up with business partner Normand Lavoie to launch NewTerra in December 2020, and they now serve around 100 residential customers and about a dozen local restaurants.
Their restaurant customers can typically fill a 65-gallon container with food waste within two days, and unlike homeowners, they don’t have the option to just start a compost pile in the backyard.
And those with a backyard compost pile often find that it’s more work than they thought to turn the compost and keep it at a temperature that’s high enough to kill viruses and pathogens, Ryan said.