Ray Leard - Turning Compost Into Cash

[00:00:10] Adam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Green Champions.

[00:00:13] Dominique: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire.

[00:00:22] Adam: And I'm so glad to be here alongside Dominique, the sustainability expert. We bring you guests who saw the potential for impact in their job work community, and did something about it.

[00:00:30] Dominique: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists, activists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant some new ideas.

[00:00:40] Adam: So whether you're turning in during a walk with your dog, listening along at home, taking a drive. Today, Dominique and I are joined by Ray Leard, who is the King of Compost, who started the Compost Exchange over a dozen years ago and has really done a lot to transform how composting is approached here in Columbus.

[00:00:56] Adam: On our last episode, Ray shared all about how he got started when he came to Columbus and started building up the compost, diving into that history of how the Compost Exchange got off the ground and started growing. Along with some 101 tips of like what composting actually means. 

[00:01:11] Dominique: Yeah. Today we're gonna unpack Ray's green champion story, talking about how he built the first and largest service provider of residential curbside food scrap recycling and composting in Central Ohio. And we're also gonna talk about the work that he's focused on right now. So Ray, welcome back.

[00:01:28] Ray: Well, thank you. Thanks for having me again. 

[00:01:29] Dominique: So Ray, we heard last time about what the compost exchange is and how you've built from like a really relationship focused founding, wanting to connect with people and bring something that, that they need. What do people typically not know about how you grew this business that you think was really key to your success?

[00:01:44] Ray: One of the main things is that it was built or advanced over the years based on things that like the Bexley pilot. If we had never done that, or if I'd never done it before, I would've tried to do it when I separated in '19.

[00:01:59] Dominique: Mm-Hmm.

[00:02:00] Ray: And then '20 when I got my assistant. But that's what we did, is that every spring and fall we figured out people are away in the summer and it's too cold in the winter, so let's have the pilots In the spring and the fall. And so for the last three years, that's what we've been doing or we did.

[00:02:14] Dominique: So how was that pilot structured? Give us some context if we don't know. 

[00:02:17] Ray: Yeah, we would choose Dublin or a neighborhood or Clintonville. Through Instagram, we would announce that we were offering a free pilot and it wasn't for a year. We started with six weeks and that got willed down to five eventually. But as far as being able to offer people a free experience and then have enough time for them to just to experience it and then tell us what they thought. And typically we would get half the folks to sign up and that's really the driver. But one of the other things that we decided to do a long time ago was not to try and serve an area until we were ready, until we had the manpower, the vans in place, and a place to take the materials so that it wouldn't collapse on itself. And a lot of the collectors, which that's what we became in '19. I wasn't processing we just collected. And so we needed to have places to take it who were processors so that all those things had to be in place. And so there was no one else doing it to our scale. 

[00:03:10] Ray: So that really never was an issue because it's not a very, well, the perception is that it's not a very fun business. It's a dirty business-smelly. Because we collect the material in compostable liners, it isn't smelly either, honest. And so, that was never an issue. We had to kind of have a place where you had a transfer station was a challenge. And the end of '19 because of the separation that I made with my ex-partners and the innovative organics. And I decided to go off on my own just to do the residential. That was my specialty, was to do residential work because commercial is a whole 'nother ball game. 

[00:03:45] Adam: How is that different?

[00:03:47] Ray: Well, the main thing in commercial is that you have like a restaurant or maybe assisted living place, or maybe it's a college, you know, whatever it is. You have a continually new set of participants. At a home when you have, two parents and three kids, takes maybe a couple weeks to get used to it, but they don't change. In a business, you have new people all the time. Unless you have the folks at the top insist that we're doing this, this is part of our mission. 

[00:04:14] Ray: And in 17, 18, 19, mostly 2017, 2018, at that time, six years ago now, there were probably still are the same companies that they actually had hired a sustainability manager.

[00:04:26] Dominique: Mm-Hmm.

[00:04:26] Ray: Because they knew that corporately, because of the companies their size, State Auto Insurance or Huntington Bank was a customer, bunches of 'em, they're large scale companies. They knew that their competitors were probably gonna do this. So they decided we're gonna hire somebody to be in charge of our sustainability mission statement. 

[00:04:44] Ray: So many of these large companies had their own cafeterias. And when COVID came a year later, they all closed down, which is like, "Okay, so what?" In our case, we were in the residential space, not commercial. So GoZERO was, you know, in the doghouse. A couple ways. And then George, my ex-partner, his place got shut down by the health department.

[00:05:07] Dominique: Oh really? 

[00:05:08] Ray: Yeah. But we just, you know, again, very focused on west of 71 on a map, you know, 71, right? 

[00:05:15] Ray: So our focus is on the Clintonville Worthington. We weren't into Delaware yet when we first started in '18, '19. But Dublin, Hilliard, Grandview, Arlington, and then the places where we are, near east side

[00:05:29] Dominique: Mm-Hmm. 

[00:05:30] Ray: And so we got bigger, got more organized, started doing the pilots, saw that they were working, people liked them. They were not forever, just five, six weeks. Right. And I again got lucky. One of my employees was a recent grad of OSU and he became my Instagram guy. 

[00:05:47] Dominique: Okay. 

[00:05:48] Ray: He moved to Denver, working for a startup out there. And he would do the work that we needed done on his own time. And basically he would do all the technical stuff of running a campaign, this pilot thing, and that involved, you know, a weekly set of emails. Week 6, week 5, or week 4, 3, 2, 1, each week there would be an email go out at the end of the pilot, there'll be a special email go out.

[00:06:10] Ray: It was difficult trying to get all the buckets back for the folks who didn't wanna do it anymore. And then the other ones just signed up. We kept it really as simple as possible. The website that we had worked pretty well. 

[00:06:20] Ray: It worked and I don't spend money being one of 11. You just don't spend money get used to it. So, you know, I've worked 24/7, didn't pay myself anything. I don't care. It's only money. I didn't really need the money 'cause I had sold, you know, the business to the folks back in Athens. So I had that, those funds. So it was a real tight ship and not a lot of layers like other companies. You usually do it. And what do you mean you work seven days a week? Yeah, just work seven days a week. Okay. You are nuts. Oh, okay. Fine.

[00:06:49] Adam: Be nuts, But, you're saving the planet. 

[00:06:50] Ray: But it worked. So my assistant and I were kind of built the same way in that respect, that we just wanted to make it happen. We were so driven to make this thing work that it wouldn't matter what happened. We would just pivot and try something else until it did work. So we got bigger and then, you know, Hilliard came, and the east side came eventually in '21, '22. Delaware came. And so we were approaching 3000 members and it was working. But the dream was always to have a processing plant like I had in Athens.

[00:07:21] Dominique: Mm-Hmm.

[00:07:22] Adam: So you said here in Columbus, you've only ever been collector. What are some of the issues around starting that processing plant?

[00:07:29] Ray: Ah, the codes in Columbus are designed so that no one wants to.

[00:07:33] Dominique: Say more.

[00:07:34] Ray: Well, from what I understand, that there's a special permit you have to get. It takes about six extra months.

[00:07:39] Dominique: Okay. 

[00:07:39] Ray: Okay, you can't have a facility that's within 600 square feet of any residential. It has to be all in a manufacturer M or MM1. And there's quite a bit of, of land like that along all the railroad tracks. They're all grandfathered M for manufacturing, right? But there's not a whole lot left. At the same time during the teens, early twenties, everybody was gobbling it up, the good spaces. There just doesn't any land. 

[00:08:04] Ray: There's land south of town. SWACO has a whole bunch. SWACO tried to get a big player to come in. They had an RFQ versus RFP company qualification qualifying request who wants to be considered for the RFP, right? And they were hoping to get a company with deep pockets from the west coast or east coast, who's has like five years of experience on a big scale doing 50,000 tons or a hundred thousand tons a year stuff. You know, a lot of material and I'm used to it.

[00:08:32] Ray: To come in and do the same thing. SWACO had the land, you know, it's almost like a monopoly, like a, you know, rum key. Am I allowed to say that? Can I can? Anyway.

[00:08:40] Dominique: Also, we haven't clarified that. Just for anyone listening, SWACO is the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio.

[00:08:46] Dominique: And we've, we've been dropping SWACO a few times.

[00:08:48] Ray: They run the landfill. Right. But as far as the processing part. And as far where we eventually would take materials. During 2022 and 2023, we were taking our materials to, as a coincidence again when Innovative Organics, when I split from them in '19 in May, the deal was that I would be able for a year and a half to bring my materials there for free. Okay, fair enough. In '19, of that same year, the Health Department closed it down.

[00:09:14] Adam: Uh oh.

[00:09:15] Ray: At the very same moment, honest. It's like it's meant to be this thing. At the very same moment, London opened up with David Andre GoZERO as the contracted vendor that his job was to bring them the food scraps. They would make compost, they would give it back to him free.

[00:09:34] Dominique: Oh, 

[00:09:35] Ray: Such a deal is only made in heaven somewhere.

[00:09:38] Adam: The universe conspires.

[00:09:39] Dominique: How does that make sense for someone who's like, "I don't get how that would work." How did that work?

[00:09:44] Ray: Well, he gets compost for free. Saleable compost, screen compost, right?

[00:09:48] Dominique: So he's just willing to sell the byproduct?

[00:09:51] Ray: Well, yeah, but he had to bring all the food scraps. So he went out and scaled up. In 2020, all those totes that he bought were in that back of the London facility in a huge barn where they had their facility and they were all sitting there 'cause all the commercial business is gone. But didn't matter to us. We were doing residential. As again, meant to be somewhere. I mean, who would've known that was gonna be the case? 

[00:10:14] Adam: Now does that mean for compost today you have to truck it out to London?

[00:10:18] Ray: Well, they still do it, one of the four loads they take is still to London.

[00:10:22] Adam: Okay.

[00:10:23] Ray: And because you want to have the resource in hand and in case the other places go south, right? More flexibility. So the other place that we wound up taking are farms, farmers. And so that, that's the model that a lot of collectors use across the country. They will have a farmer or farmers nearby. 

[00:10:40] Ray: They take it, their pigs eat out of it, and they compost the rest, or they simply blend it with their own carbon, make compost, and apply to the fields. The EPA law states that or the rules state as I understand it, that if as long as the material doesn't leave the farm, don't call us. You don't need licensed.

[00:10:58] Dominique: Oh.

[00:10:59] Ray: That's how I understand it. And so we have three farmers. The two of 'em were new last year in '22 or a year and a half ago. You know, it worked out fine. And so that continues to be the model that they're using today, that the Compost Exchange new owners. And it's a good model because it doesn't require any capital investment. You simply have to have a relationship. And perhaps help them understand how to, you know, the recipe and how to store it and so forth. And not very hard. 

[00:11:23] Dominique: You've shared how you've grown the Compost Exchange from community to community. And some of that journey and like little catalysts that have been either like the culture was ready or the relationship was there, or the community had an incentive. What is your take on how repeatable what you've done in Central Ohio is elsewhere. We know there's composters and community composters all over the place. But do you have any take on what was really special for this to be successful here 

[00:11:48] Ray: The reality is it's like when I was a kid had the paper route,

[00:11:52] Dominique: Mm-Hmm.

[00:11:52] Ray: It was so important to have every customer be served right now. I can't tell you how many times I would get an email and right now fix it and have that member go back, " Gee, he got back so fast." And I tell people this all the time, this kind of anecdote. And that is in whatever business you're in, there's gonna be opportunity like this one, that if you can discover something that no one else is doing that needs done and you do it, you'll have lines all day long. 

[00:12:21] Adam: That sounds like a nugget of wisdom there.

[00:12:24] Ray: Well, here's the story. All right. It was 1984. I was in Norfolk, Virginia. I moved there to open a healthy deli, much like Chipotle system, which is 10 salads across the top in a 10 foot counter. 10 salads. I want a garden, a Greek, and a Mexican. Bam, bam, bam. Right in front of you. Thank you. Bam, bam, bam. Thank you. Thank you. Right? That's the Chipotle system, right? 

[00:12:46] Ray: So it was summer of '84. I was training a high school kid during lunch one day. There was a line 30 deep, and I said, the kids. I said, motion 'em over here, out of the, kind of, outta the way. I said, "You see that guy number 31 back there?" I said, "Yeah," the kid did. And I said, "Your job is that when he gets up here so well or when he gets up here to order, you serve him so well that tomorrow he becomes 32." The next day he becomes number 33 in line. That's how you build a business. It's so simple a concept, but what's it require? It requires that when he does get up here, that you're mentally not zapped or on your phone or anything else. 

[00:13:26] Ray: You take care of them. Same thing with the, at the booth. You take care of them so well that when they leave, they become your sales force for God's sake. That's a big one. But if no one else has discovers this little trick. It's like answering the phone. How do you talk on the phone? You know, it's just a technique. It's awareness. And you know, most people don't answer emails very fast, most companies. And so people get used to it. 

[00:13:50] Ray: So when you do or you get right back to 'em on the phone or, you know, maybe somebody calls, "I got missed today on the route." Right? "Okay. I'll call you right back." And, you know, "Hey, Blake," or "John, did you miss him? Can you go back?" "I'll go back." Okay. They would say. They would answer, "I would call the customer back." He's coming back and I would act excited. I wouldn't be blase about it. And so to the bottom line, I'm a passionate guy. My voice goes up and down a lot. 

[00:14:17] Ray: You clearly value the customer and putting them first and really caring about their experience. How have the customers with Compost Exchange shaped the business? Has feedback, and like really hearing them been a part of that too? 

[00:14:30] Ray: .Alright. So another pop quiz for you. 

[00:14:33] Dominique: Okay. 

[00:14:34] Ray: Alright. 

[00:14:34] Ray: Every week, before I sold the business we were collecting 20,000 pounds a week.

[00:14:39] Adam: Wow. 20,000 pounds. Okay. Yeah.

[00:14:40] Ray: Or do the math. That's about a million two. The question is how many pounds outta those 20,000, which are all comprised of buckets every, you know, bucket here, bucket there. So, you know, 10 pounds here, 15 there, 5 there. In those buckets that have compostable liners, there's a liner and there's a stuff, the food scraps. How many pounds shouldn't be in there that would be considered contaminant? You know, like, plastic wrappers, maybe glass, metal, whatever. How many pounds outta 20,000 shouldn't be in that big pile over there on the concrete where it winds up? Go ahead. Your best guess. Go ahead.

[00:15:12] Dominique: Adam, you go How many pounds?

[00:15:14] Adam: Thousand or 500 or, 

[00:15:16] Dominique: I'm hoping it's less than 500, but 

[00:15:18] Ray: This is my favorite thing to do right now it's a visual, so you can't hear me. You gotta explain less than that many.

[00:15:25] Dominique: Less than five?

[00:15:26] Adam: Five pounds out of 20,000?

[00:15:29] Ray: How do I know? I'll tell you. In the winter of 2021, I think, we're growing and we were taking a load over to London, right? We had a ton more than we could efficiently take. We would've had to have it be in a truck half full. So I found a farmer from the farmers market up in New Albany who agreed to take it. So Blake and I, my assistant, we would drive our vans there on Wednesday after our routes were done. And he would unload his thousand, I'd unload my thousand. And we would crack them open. That was the deal. He didn't want any liners, just,

[00:16:04] Dominique: Oh, he broke every bag and 

[00:16:05] Ray: We got A chance to see every bag. You'd be lucky to find one wrapper per week, honest. I. So the translation from that point on, I thought, "Gee, these people are so dedicated. They were just hitting grand slams oh, and they don't even know it." And so every time people would come to a booth at Dublin, which I ran on Saturdays, and it's a cold, you know, it's February and I'm freezing my butt off, right?

[00:16:28] Ray: They would say, "Ray, you're freezing. You're such a trooper." I'm going, "Look, I'm here three hours a week. You're home 24/7. And it's perfect." The people at London, literally the guy who runs London, I mean, a dozen times at least he told me, " You guys have the cleanest stuff." You almost hear him clapping as we approach. Honest. Honest, I'm serious. He's told that a dozen times. "You guys never have any junk ever," as if he was amazed.

[00:16:53] Dominique: Do you think that's key to how you communicated to your customers what should go into the bin or do you think it's something else? Because not everybody knows what goes in the compost bin. How'd you get it so clean? What are you doing? 

[00:17:03] Ray: How do I get them to do it that way?

[00:17:05] Dominique: Yeah.

[00:17:06] Ray: I don't, they're committed and that's what you want. 

[00:17:08] Dominique: There's like an element of style to the compost exchange. I remember you telling me the story of how you organized the bins going down the road for the compost exchange? 

[00:17:16] Dominique: What's that story?

[00:17:17] Ray: Oh, real fast. The pilot in Bexley was behind and early on in '18, I was in the van with my assistant. We were behind the recycling truck from the city. And I just watched him for a moment. He gets off the truck, goes over, gets his bin. Our buckets were there at that time, they were still on the curb, instead of the side walk. But he got his bucket, walked over the truck, you know, dumped the material into the truck and he swiveled and simply threw the bucket back. I'm going, "This is gonna be too easy." I said, "From now on, we go get our bucket with the clean one and that time, we actually swap buckets.

[00:17:53] Ray: So you walk with a clean bucket in your hand, grab the bucket, walk to the other side of the sidewalk, and neatly put our bucket with the label out and the handle back, all of them. And the assistant says, "Ray, it's only a bucket. What's the deal?" I'm going. Be patient. At the end of the block. We'll have a look." We're in the block. What do you see?" "Well, of course ours are perfect and the others look like crap." Of course they did.

[00:18:19] Dominique: Yeah.

[00:18:20] Ray: For this particular truck that I saw. And so I said, " Who else might see that that it's like that?" Ah, the members in the houses for the pilot that are kinda like wondering how this is gonna work. And then who might they tell? The mayor? And they did. 

[00:18:35] Dominique: Oh really? 

[00:18:35] Ray: Oh, yeah. 

[00:18:36] Adam: Word gets around

[00:18:37] Ray: And so, it was a slam dunk and they also didn't expect that the buckets were spotless every week. And they were, "How come?" Because I clean them all every week, you know, and I'm not going raise a genius. Another little thing. If that's what really matter to people and they're telling you don't tell anybody else that it's like that, that it matters a lot.

[00:18:59] Ray: If you do it and no one else catches on, they will line up 31, 32, 33. I don't care what the business is, it's the same. Just a matter of being aware that you really wanna hit a home run and you care enough not just about the money.

[00:19:16] Dominique: Yeah. The attention to detail and the responsiveness are all just like, yeah, tied together and like you care about really the whole customer experience. 

[00:19:25] Ray: The whole package.

[00:19:26] Adam: That's my takeaway from this, is just how much love you put into building that customer relationship and making people feel valued in that. 

[00:19:33] Ray: We're dealing with people here, folks. Not a widget or an AI thing or you know, social media, Facebook, whatever. We're dealing with people. If you can come across like you're beyond all that, you just, you're back to old fashioned "Hi Bob. How can I help you?" To the best I can.

[00:19:51] Dominique: You really boil it down to just do it better. Just be better. Be there. 

[00:19:55] Ray: Figure out out what better is. That's your mission. You can match what we do, but you'll never beat me. Ever. And that's, I've told that people for a long, long time.

[00:20:07] Ray: They can try to match us, but they'll never beat us.

[00:20:10] Adam: I love this. Well, we're so glad that you've been on today. Like, I love this whole story, journey of growing the Compost Exchange, but kind of this life lesson behind the story of how you treat people and, and how, to grow that. 

[00:20:23] Dominique: And I've got one last small question for you. 

[00:20:24] Ray: Okay. 

[00:20:25] Ray: But the one thing that needs to happen next in Columbus, and it's rampant issue across the country and most large is, there's no processing capacity. So the reason for the sale one, was to try and get a grant from the EPA to have them help build a processing plant inside 270 the one of several. And not a huge thing, but one that's like if you go to Dayton, there's two there. Anyway, in this system, it's an in vessel system. It doesn't smell

[00:20:52] Ray: No runoff. The EPA endorses it.

[00:20:55] Dominique: Okay.

[00:20:56] Ray: If you go to, this is for your, everybody. You go to Greenacres Compost video, Google that. 

[00:21:02] Adam: We'll link to that in the show notes.

[00:21:04] Dominique: Yeah.

[00:21:04] Ray: Yeah. Go there. And then same thing with the Dayton Area Food Bank Compost video. There are videos there that these two people will, Nate and Cincinnati is great. And so that's the system we'd like to bring to Columbus. I'm looking for a soil science major. You can run it. And, um, but these systems, hybrid version can do the way I've envisioned about 15 to 20 tons a day. And so you have enough of those who are around the city that are community composters, not some big monopoly down south of town. Then people will again, relate to, "Where's your stuff go? "Oh, it goes three miles away. I get some back twice a year."

[00:21:40] Ray: It is a relationship that they feel part of it, not, "Oh yeah. Some big company does, and they, they rate their rates go, whatever." You know, this is the relationship. Again, the whole city's into it. "Hey, let's go to Columbus and see how it's done. They figured it out." That's what this is about. That's the next step.

[00:22:00] Adam: I love it.

[00:22:01] Ray: There you go.

[00:22:02] Dominique: I was gonna say, congrats on selling the Compost Exchange and this transition that you're making now. Kinda the bookend, this whole story that that's what an amazing thing to be able to say about something you've built. That it's gonna carry on and you get to move on to new projects. And I was going to ask you if, when you think about the change you wanna see in our community and what we need to be focusing on now, what is that and you already got to it, and it is needing to have a processing facility locally.

[00:22:28] Ray: That's true. As part of that though, what really needs to happen is that, that the inclusion thing needs to happen for the city of Columbus. That this sense, it needs to be something that doesn't get done just in the suburbs or the folks who are kind of into it. This is something that we need to do because it's our planet at stake. 

[00:22:46] Ray: And this isn't the main thing, it's just one of several things that need to happen is to get the food scraps to recycle them so that the plant doesn't suffer. And also we get to use those materials again. And that, that involves, this shouldn't be about skin color, religion, how you vote, what kind of car you drive, none of that stuff. It should be about, this is such an easy ask. Put it over here instead of there guys. That's it. 

[00:23:14] Adam: We win, We win.

[00:23:16] Dominique: You do make it sound very simple. 

[00:23:17] Adam: It is simple. 

[00:23:18] Dominique: Yeah. It is., 

[00:23:19] Adam: I can attest to that. 

[00:23:20] Ray: Again, if you had the, again, the process and capacity, a place to send it to that will not deter new collectors from becoming collectors because, "Oh, my margins all spent having to take it out to London or some farm out in some other county." Versus nearby. "I can make some money. I can have a good living, hire some good people, do some good work, oh, and do some good work. 

[00:23:43] Ray: There you go. 

[00:23:44] Dominique: And remind us how listeners can connect with you.

[00:23:47] Ray: Oh, okay. My email is rayleard@purelyamericanorganics.com. 

[00:23:53] Dominique: Yeah, thank you so much, Ray.

[00:23:55] Adam: Thanks so much for joining us. As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We are here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career, or interest, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change.

[00:24:08] Dominique: If you know a green champion, that should be our next guest, email us at thegreenchampions@gmail.com. You can find our show notes at thegreenchampions.com. Our music is by Zayn Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions. We'll be digging into another success story in our next episode with the next guest. 

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