It feels amazingly appropriate that Crown Town Compost began its life on bicycles. This choice wasn’t due to some strict noble principle but strictly due to practicality. Bikes were what the company’s founders had to get around town with to make their collections.
The idea behind Crown Town Compost germinated in 2014 when Kris Steele, David Valder, and Marcus Carson met at an entrepreneurship workshop in Charlotte, North Carolina. The trio discovered a shared interest in environmental conservation and came up with a composting firm concept not just to launch a business but because they had a grander goal of doing something that would have a positive impact on their community. The fact they went around the various Charlotte neighborhoods on bicycles certainly helped to highlight their sustainability message.
Photo Courtesy Crown Town Landscapes
Now, a decade later, Crown Town has long outgrown its bike routes. The company now services hundreds of homes and businesses in the greater Charlotte area. One reason for its successful growth is that the owners have made it very simple for businesses and homeowners to compost with them.
Residential customers get a small 3.5-gallon bucket inside their houses and a 24-gallon bin to keep outside. They have a choice of bi-weekly and weekly pickup service, and there are several drop-off locations around Charlotte, too.
Crown Town customizes its service for businesses to fit clients’ needs while offering training programs to facilitate proper composting techniques.
As of 2022, Crown Town Compost was diverting around 200 tons of food waste from local landfills annually. While this is an impressive amount, the company also recognizes that this amount represents just a drop in the bucket as it adds up to only a small percentage of the approximately 200,000 tons of food waste generated annually in Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located. Still, the volume of diverted food waste Crown Town collects does contribute to reducing greenhouse gases and combating climate change.
Photo Courtesy Crown Town Compost
Steele and fellow Crown Town owner Eric Theys have described what they do to Inside UNC Charlotte as like being “milkmen of the new century” except that they pick up food waste and return it as highly useful fertilizer. Crown Town utilizes a locally based anaerobic digester to process food waste into nutrient-rich soil, which they offer back to their clients.
“It’s a full-circle process,” Theys told Charlotte Magazine, “from food waste to compost to growing more food.” This type of enriched, moisture-retaining soil contains many valuable environmental benefits, such as decreasing plant disease and pest infestation, as well as lowering the demand for chemical fertilizers.
Photo Courtesy Crown Town Compost
However, what Crown Town came to discover was that its customers didn’t know what to do with the soil they received. To solve this situation, the company started an environmentally focused landscaping firm whose mission is to empower people to improve the beauty and health of their homes and the planet. As Theys has stated to Inside UNC Charlotte: “Compost isn’t sexy, but everybody likes a beautiful yard.”
Crown Town Landscapes utilizes electric mowers, which cut down on air and noise pollution while decreasing carbon emissions that gas-powered mowers would produce.
Additionally, they have expertise in replacing traditional lawns with low-maintenance, drought-resistant and native plantings, which delivers positive benefits not only to human residents but to local fauna and flora, too.
Photo Courtesy Crown Town Compost
Crown Town is part of a larger civic effort in the Charlotte area to eliminate waste and create an eco-friendly circular economy by 2050. The company became a tenant of the Innovation Barn when it opened in 2021.
This community space, housed in a renovated 36,000-square-foot former horse barn, is home to local, sustainability-minded companies and serves as an incubator for actualizing new entrepreneurial concepts. The city’s zero-waste initiatives have received widespread attention. Newsweek even recently selected Charlotte as one of the five cities in the world that are “leading the way to a greener world.”
