Building Bootstrap Compost, From the Ground Up

Every week or so as I’m leaving my apartment in downtown Boston, I notice a white five-gallon bucket marked with black stenciled letters outside my neighbor’s front stoop. I frequently saw these buckets all over Somerville, too, when I used to live there. Written on the front in all capital letters is “Bootstrap Compost.” I’ve been seeing these buckets around for years.

Bootstrap Compost was founded in 2011, and was the first company to make food waste collection and composting accessible to residents and businesses in the Greater Boston area. More than a decade later, the environmental benefits of keeping food waste out of the trash are more widely understood, practiced, and regulated. The City of Boston launched a free curbside composting program for residents in 2022. Cambridge launched theirs four years before that. The state currently diverts about 360,000 tons of food waste from landfills annually, and hopes to divert 780,000 tons by 2030 as part of its Organics Action Plan. 

Bootstrap Compost founder and CEO Andy Brooks sees this all as a furthering of his mission — and, admittedly, a little bit of competition. But his company offers something that the city’s doesn't: premium bucket service — meaning Bootstrap employees pick the bins up, dump them out, clean them, and return them with a fresh compostable liner. Andy told me he calls this model the company’s “bread and butter.”

“Our mantra is clean, convenient community composting,” he said. “That’s our North Star.”

There’s an emphasis on education, too. 

“I get really excited about going into schools and talking to young people about the merits of food waste diversion, which is a key part of the Bootstrap brand,” Andy said. “Educating young minds about the merits of being mindful about your resources and what you do with them.”

Bootstrap began as a backyard business in Andy’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

“I was a reporter looking for a career change,” Andy said. “I knew I wanted to do something that was physical, and I knew that I wanted to do something that was sustainable.”

He heard of a few composting companies in Vermont and Northampton, companies like Pedal People, which he referred to as “the real old school folks” who he drew inspiration from. 

“I was just so struck by the model. I really liked the immediacy of it. I liked that there wasn’t much start-up cost,” Andy said. “I was attracted to the fact that there was a void in the Boston area for something like that, and it sort of checked all the boxes for me.” 

After posting some flyers around JP and getting publicity in a local blog, Andy quickly had a growing clientele. 

“I knew at that point there was a genuine interest for food scrap diversion for homes in the Boston area, and was just so thrilled that was the case, and that’s proven to be the case,” he said. 

In the beginning, when composting was still a little on the fringe, “the people signing up weren’t trying something new,” Andy said.  “They were trying something they saw their grandparents do, or that they did when they were children.” 

Now that composting has become more ubiquitous, the clientele has diversified. “It’s like sushi,” Andy said. “More people are willing to try it.” 

He said his biggest advocates and supporters are women between the ages of 30 and 65: “They get it,” Andy said. (As a woman who falls within that demographic, I can’t help but agree.)

Bootstrap has 3,500 residential customers and 300 commercial customers across its service areas, which include Boston, the Merrimack Valley, Providence, and Hudson Valley, New York, where Andy lives now. In Boston, much to Andy’s surprise and delight, Bootstrap was able to carve out a premium customer niche serving offices. 

“There’s plenty of offices in the Boston area, and that’s been a real boon for us,” Andy said. “And within that space, the biotech industry has been a real welcome segment of our commercial base.” 

Bootstrap has 14 vehicles for their frequent food waste collections, most of which are cargo vans but some are pickup trucks. The company has about 30 full-time employees, and the food scraps they collect are brought to different partnering farms or facilities who will use it as animal feed. In Massachusetts, some of those farms include Wright-Locke Farm in Winchester, Rocky Hill Farm in Saugus, The Hidden Acres Farm in Medway, and Meadow Farm in Lee. 

“We’re a little bit different from other composting companies because we don’t manage a site,” Andy said. “That was intentional and is intentional. It allows us to really focus on customer service and hauling.”

Bootstrap was fully “bootstrapped” until about 2022, meaning they paid for everything themselves. In 2022, Andy decided to start taking out loans to invest in equipment, infrastructure, and personnel “in anticipation of favorable legislation not only in Massachusetts, but in Rhode Island and New York that encourages and requires food waste diversion,” he said.

Bootstrap is working on securing a unit that will attach to the back of pickup trucks to make it easier to haul more organics at a time. 

“It’s called a Par-Kan,” Andy said. “They make these really cool hoppers that come with a toter lift. What makes it so novel is that it’s small, so you can serve a place like Boston or Providence without having a massive truck that requires all sorts of Department of Transportation clearance regulations.”

Andy hopes these units will help Bootstrap serve more clients, offering what he calls “dirty bucket service,” which is the model Boston and many other free municipal composting programs use, where workers dump the toters into larger bins without the extra step of sterilizing them after. 

“There’s a massive share of the market we’re not tapping into because our price point is prohibitive,” Andy said. “If we do dirty bucket service, we’re going to get a lot more households and have greater impact.”

It costs the average Bootstrap residential customer about $11 per weekly pick up, and $16 per biweekly visit. Bootstrap also works within environmental justice communities to offer reduced prices. 

“I’m sort of a reluctant CEO. I’m not super driven by business,” Andy said. “I mean, of course I’d love to make money and I’d like my time to be compensated, but I get excited about the work we do in environmental justice communities where we offer reduced rate service, making composting as accessible as possible. I’m most interested in how the community benefits from this.”

Looking forward, that’s what his company will continue to prioritize. Bootstrap is in the middle of raising money through their Bootstrap Bond Program, which aims to raise $750,000 to expand their services in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Bootstrap is also making moves to secure its own processing site to avoid tip fees, manage inputs, and “be in more control of things,” Andy said.

“I was one of those young frustrated people wondering why there aren’t solar panels on every corner,” he reflected. “A dream for me would be that Bootstrap Compost continues to grow, and that we continue to make composting accessible and fun for people across the region. I think our model is compelling, and it’s rewarding, and if that could exist for years and years and decades to come, I would be completely happy.” 

To learn more about Bootstrap Compost and its many services, or to sign up, visit bootstrapcompost.com.