Curbside Food Waste Pickup

Curbside food waste collection available to Blacksburg & Christiansburg VA addresses! We are waiting until we get 25 households interested before we start accepting payments and collecting waste. If you’re interested shoot us a email so that we can get you onto our contact list for when we begin service. livingsoiltreefarm@gmail.com

Close by but outside of Blacksburg/Christiansburg? Send us an email with your address and we will let you know if we can fit you into our route. livingsoiltreefarm@gmail.com or use our contact form below. Sign up for our newsletter for updates!

Tired of throwing your food waste into the garbage to be hauled off to a landfill? Our curbside pickup service exists to divert your food waste from the landfill and instead haul it to a compost facility where it will be processed and used on local farms to grow food!

Our service is very simple. When you sign up, we will drop off a 5-gallon bucket with a lid and a compostable liner (bag). All you have to do is fill it up with food waste and leave it outside your front door on pickup day. We will empty the bucket and provide a fresh liner at every pickup. Your food waste will be hauled to Star City Compost to be processed. Curious to learn more about the compost process? Send us an email to learn more.  

We offer several pickup options for our curbside customers:

Weekly pickup - $30/month

Bi-weekly pickup - $20/month

Seasonal program (Buckets picked up weekly during warmer months & biweekly during colder months)

- $25/month

All customers are asked to pay an additional $33 start up fee to cover the cost of initial bucket and lid delivery.

$33 start-up fee, payment for the first month of service, and agreeing to our Residential Service Contract are all needed to begin services. Once registration is complete, we'll deliver your bucket and compostable liner.

Seasonal Curbside includes Bi-Weekly pickup for colder months (November, December, January, February, March, and April), Weekly for warmer months (May, June, July, August, September, and October)     

We compost your food waste Locally. By partnering with local farms, we ensure that your food waste becomes part of the local food chain. Quality compost is a very important resource for farms because of how it improves soil structure, provides fertility to plants, and inoculates soil with beneficial microbes.

Compost, when applied to soil, increases the water retention ability of soils while also allowing for excess water to drain more effectively. This may seem like a contradiction, how can compost do both of those things? Compost improves the structure of the soil and adds more pore space. This allows for better water retention in sandy soils and better drainage in heavy clay. Compost also helps to inoculate farm fields with beneficial soil microbes which boosts plant immunity and productivity. Additionally compost contains soluble plant nutrients and therefore integrating into farm soils decreases the need for fertilizer.

Local farms are not the only benefactors; compost has an amazing ability to filter pollutants in runoff water. This helps protect and improve our waterways. No matter what angle you approach things from quality compost leads to healthier soils, plants, animals, and people.

Healthy soils have an immense ability to sequester greenhouse gases from the environment! Check out this video from Dr. Elaine’s™ Soil Food Web Approach to learn more about soil carbon sequestration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECHYChDUfhQ&t=5s

In addition to all of the benefits listed above composting food waste is an easy and tangible way to cut down on the amount of greenhouse gases we emit. Food waste sitting in a landfill releases methane and CO2 as well as nitrous oxide and other gases. All of these are potent greenhouse gases but methane is especially harmful in the short term due to the severity of its warming impact. 

In a properly managed compost pile food waste will emit significantly less greenhouse gases. On top of that, applying compost to soil helps to sequester carbon. This further offsetts any CO2 released during the composting process. The only alternative to composting or landfilling food waste is to send it to an anaerobic digestor. This specific type of composting process is contained inside a vessel so that all gases can be captured. The resulting gases are then burned as fuel resulting in release of CO2. Anaerobic digestors have a place in the toolkit of solutions to our problems but they do not make a high quality input for farms.