Portland composting company poised for major growth after expansion
Photo / Contributed by We Compost It!
We Compost It!'s new food scrap collection truck at the company's new 10-acre facility in Auburn.
A Portland-based composting company expects to quadruple its customers after expanding its food scrap processing capacity and changing its name to reflect a new regional focus.
We Compost It!, formerly known as Resurgam, has added a 10-acre Auburn processing facility to its existing three-acre plant in Portland, the company announced recently. The company, founded in 2011, also purchased a new truck to help with its regional push.
Brett Richardson, the company’s general manager, told Mainebiz the new facility means the company will be able to expand its capacity, which maxed out with nearly 100 business customers in 2013. The customers — which Richardson refers to as “partners” because of the shared benefits in reducing waste and finding market approaches in doing so — range from hospitals and schools to coffee shops and restaurants.
Before adding the Auburn facility, We Compost It! was only able to collect and process about 250 tons of food scraps a month, he said. With the new facility, which is owned by mulch manufacturer MB Bark, the company is now able to process 1,000 tons a month.
Combined with its new “cutting edge” food scrap collection truck, Richardson said the company will be able to expand its footprint beyond the greater Portland area, covering anywhere from York County to the Lewiston-Auburn area. He said the company already has new customers in Lewiston and Brunswick, and has already made use of the truck, which brandishes the company’s new name and orange color scheme.
“We’ll eventually be up in Augusta and north of that,” Richardson said. “Once you build a dense client base and you have more stops, it becomes more efficient. It’s a strategic approach to building clients that keeps the costs down for everyone.”
Richardson said he expects the company’s customer base to quadruple from the nearly 100 customers the company already serves. Depending on the volume of new business, he said that would allow the company to hire 12 to 20 additional workers on top of its four existing employees, but the hiring wouldn’t happen all at once.
“We Compost It! has helped restaurants, hotels, hospitals and local schools divert more than 10 million pounds of organic scraps from the waste stream since 2011,” Richardson said in a statement. “Our new truck and facility will enable us to serve new partners and new market areas to take organics recycling to the next level in northern New England.”
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