Paula Luu

I have spent a long time thinking about systems, how they break, how they hold, and what it actually takes to change them. Since 2010, I have been working to bring people together to solve supply chain challenges that no single company, or really any single industry, can solve alone. The problems worth solving require collaboration across the boundaries we normally stay inside of. That kind of pre-competitive collaboration is less kumbaya and easy than it sounds, and far more necessary.

Stepping into the editorial role at BioCycle — a publication that has been the organics recycling industry’s authority since 1960 — is not something I take lightly. Nora Goldstein, my friend and my mentor, spent 47 years helping to shape this publication into one of the most trusted homes in any industry I have encountered. These are immense shoes to fill, and I know it. I carry Nora’s and her family’s legacy as both an honor and a compass. My own contribution will be grounded in the tools I know best to use — data-driven strategy, finance, and collaboration — because this industry has too much potential, and too much organic waste still ending up in landfills, to leave any tool unused.

The Bright Spots

It has been a heavy year to read the news. War. Economic uncertainty. A relentless churn of events rooted, so often, in the same underlying failure. People unwilling or unable to work together. What I find genuinely difficult is staying positive and present in work that feels like it matters, when the world outside keeps making that feel naive. I have struggled with that, like many of you probably have.

But, many bright spots, for me, this year have come from the organics recycling industry.

As part of my onboarding to BioCycle, I revisited the magazine’s 50th anniversary edition, published in 2009. In it, Nora had written a sweeping retrospective of her father Jerome Goldstein’s founding vision, tracing the magazine back to its roots as Compost Science in 1960. What struck her, and what struck me reading it now, was how much of what we consider emerging today has roots going back 40 or 50 years. As Nora wrote, it is “quite remarkable that we have come as far as we have” given the forces, political, economic, and human nature, that have always preferred the simpler route of disposal.

I later found a Jerome Goldstein editorial from the September/October 1971 edition, headlined “How Does a Municipal Recycling Program Succeed? A Hell of a Lot of Work.” In it is the line:

“By its very nature, recycling demands interaction between segments of society that have grown accustomed to ignoring each other.”

Fifty-five years later, that is still the work. It is the hardest part and the most necessary part. And it is the part that, in my experience, this industry has always done better than it gets credit for.

I was reminded of this at the New York State Organics Summit, where I had the privilege of sharing insights on financing strategies for organizational growth and then spending evenings in conversation with some of the most quietly dedicated people I know. Operators who do not let down their customers. Entrepreneurs who built businesses on a shoestring because the policy environment was not ready and the capital was not there, but the need absolutely was. Community builders who have spent decades proving, region by region, that food scraps, yard trimmings, and organic residuals can become something valuable. That waste, handled well, is not waste at all. These are the bright spots I am holding onto in these times.

A Watershed Moment

Composting was forged largely without federal support. The policies that lit the early spark, land disposal bans passed in the 1980s and 1990s, created the imperative, and a generation of entrepreneurs answered with ingenuity and stubbornness. For decades, this industry grew not because the return on investment was easy or because the government had made it simple, but because the people in it refused to stop. Now several forces are converging in ways that feel different.

State-level organics mandates are spreading, creating regulatory floors that make the business case more legible to outside capital. Extended Producer Responsibility policy conversations are beginning to draw packaging and food system players into accountability frameworks that could reshape feedstock dynamics significantly. Fertilizer prices have risen in ways that are making compost’s and digestate’s agronomic value newly competitive. And the data on food waste diversion from landfill, while still incomplete, is moving in a direction that signals real behavioral and systems change at scale.

On the capital side, organizations like ReFED and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance are stepping into a space that has been chronically underfunded, helping to connect operators with the financing structures they need to grow. This is not a flood of capital. But it is a meaningful shift in attention, and attention from the right institutions tends to compound.

Meanwhile, organics recyclers themselves are not waiting. Contamination, one of the sector’s most persistent and underappreciated challenges, is being addressed with new energy as operators launch their own contamination pilots and push for cleaner feedstocks from the source. That kind of on-the-ground innovation, driven by people who understand the problem because they live it every day, is why I’m most excited to write for BioCycle for the foreseeable future.

None of this is simple. Infrastructure is lagging behind policy ambition in many states. Access to capital remains deeply uneven, with smaller and community-rooted operators still struggling to reach the financing available to larger players. Contamination is a system-design challenge as much as a communications one. And the federal funding environment has shifted in ways the industry will need to navigate carefully.

In the face of these headwinds, the people in this industry have always done more with less than anyone expected. The entrepreneurial grit that built this sector from the ground up (no pun intended) is still very much present. What is changing is the context around it, and context matters.

Earth Day, Every Day

I came to BioCycle because I believe organics recycling is one of the clearest examples of what it looks like to build a more livable world, not through grand gestures, but through daily operations, complex logistics, and the kind of collaboration that requires checking your ego and assumptions at the door. Jerome Goldstein understood in 1971 that progress depends on interaction across segments of society that would otherwise ignore each other. My commitment in this role is to keep those segments connected, using data-driven strategy, finance, and collaboration to build on the remarkable progress this industry has already made.

Earth Week comes around once a year. The people in this industry make Earth Day an everyday occurrence. They are out there every day, turning organic matter into healthy soils, clean energy, and proving that a better system is not only possible, but already being built.

For that, I am deeply grateful. And for what this industry has to offer in the decades to come, the innovation, the growth, the communities it will nourish, I am hopeful.

I’m so glad to be here with you.

– Paula Luu, Managing Director of BioCycle