Top Photo: Courtesy of Rust Belt Riders. Ariel shot at their facility in Cleveland, Ohio.
Paula Luu
At the 2026 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina, the nonprofit working to solve food waste announced the newest cohort of its Catalytic Grant Fund, a pooled financing vehicle designed to deploy flexible, risk-tolerant capital to food waste solutions with the potential for outsized climate impact. This round’s open call, titled Minimizing Methane Through Food Waste Solutions, was deliberately structured around two of the most stubborn methane-generating systems in the U.S. food supply chain: organic waste decomposing in landfills and emissions from beef and dairy operations. Of the nine organizations selected, five are working in the organics recycling space — four local composters and one research foundation — and taken together they tell a more specific story than any single grant announcement usually does.
The methane framing reflects a genuine shift in how ReFED is thinking about where the most tractable climate leverage lives.” By 2024, we were seeing a growing focus on methane reduction across the climate sector,” said Angel Veza, Director of Innovation Initiatives at ReFED. “And as ReFED was looking at its work, we saw an opportunity to focus on the one-two punch of reducing methane both in the production and disposal of food.” Prevention has long sat at the top of ReFED’s hierarchy, and it remains there, but Veza was direct about the numbers. Even with aggressive prevention efforts, the tonnages needed to meaningfully move the methane needle require diversion infrastructure to be part of the solution. That reasoning is what put composting infrastructure, for the first time, at the center of ReFED’s capital deployment strategy.
Since launching in 2022, the Catalytic Grant Fund’s portfolio of 21 grantees has gone on to secure more than $42.6 million in follow-on funding, a 13x multiplier that reflects how early-stage, patient capital can de-risk operators enough to attract what comes next. That statistic is the organizing logic behind this cohort. ReFED is not simply funding good work; it is underwriting the conditions under which traditional lenders, impact funds, and growth-stage investors can make a credible bet on composting infrastructure.
The Signal Embedded in the Structure
Four of the five composting-focused grantees – Black Earth Compost, NewTerra Compost, Organicycle, and Rust Belt Riders – received recoverable grants, a capital structure that sits between a traditional philanthropic grant and a loan. A recoverable grant is a unique philanthropic tool that bridges the gap between traditional charitable giving and impact investing. It functions like a standard grant, but the agreement specifies that the grantee must return some or all of the funds if the project hits specific financial or impact milestones.
The distinction between recoverable and non-recoverable grants signals something important to the capital markets. The recoverable grant structure reflects ReFED’s belief that this type of financing mechanism can help these organizations grow while building long-term financial resilience, and that successful repayment can demonstrate to other investors that composting businesses are not mission projects dependent on perpetual subsidy, but companies that can develop durable business models and a credible path to financial sustainability.
What makes this cohort particularly notable is that the recoverable structure cuts across very different market conditions. Black Earth Compost operates across New England, where tipping fees and regulatory pressure make economics favor diverting organics away from landfills. Cleveland-based Rust Belt Riders is growing its market share in Northeast Ohio. The state has some of the cheapest landfill tipping fees in the country and essentially no organic waste mandates on the horizon. NewTerra Compost is expanding from Chattanooga (TN) into Huntsville, Alabama, a city with zero composting facilities, no regulatory pressure, and no guaranteed demand. Organicycle is working in southwestern Michigan, partnering with WM to stand up a co-located facility in the Three Rivers region that has historically had limited composting access. These are not identical markets, and yet all four received the same signal from ReFED that their business fundamentals are strong enough to graduate from purely philanthropic capital into other forms of funding instruments.
Veza described the common thread across the four composters this way. “They have really strong teams, deep operational expertise, really strong local traction, and a clear vision for where they’re heading. We believe these teams are the ones we really wanted to invest in.” The implication is that the binding constraint in composting infrastructure is not demand or policy but the replication of proven models run by operators who know how to execute them.
Building Before the Mandate
NewTerra Compost co-founders, Normand Lavoie and Michael Ryan, stand next to their tractor and a flat-bed truck, which was obtained with a prior loan.
Two of the four composters, NewTerra and Rust Belt Riders, are making the clearest case for viability in the absence of any structural tailwind. Norm Lavoie, co-founder of NewTerra Compost, has built a residential and commercial food scrap service in Chattanooga from scratch, starting with a small tractor, collecting from his own neighborhood via a Nextdoor post, and scaling through sweat equity before the business had any financial footing. The ReFED grant is funding a new collection vehicle to extend service into Huntsville, Alabama where NewTerra has been running a weekly commercial route since November 2025. The expansion thesis is deliberate, demonstrating a crawl-walk-run strategy to enter a market before committing to infrastructure. NewTerra will use that demand data to justify the compost site the region eventually needs. “I don’t know if we can get to a diversion rate that places like Massachusetts or California are seeing without mandates,” Lavoie said, “but I still think there’s a level of participation that can happen with the people who want to participate freely.”
Robert Kurtz, Director of Hauling Operations at Rust Belt Riders, operates under a similar philosophy but with a decade of proof behind it. Rust Belt Riders is a worker-owned cooperative that has grown from collecting food scraps by bicycle to a full commercial collection and processing operation serving schools, hospitals, food manufacturers, grocery stores, and municipalities across the Cleveland region. Its soil products, sold under the Tilth Soil brand, represent approximately one-third of total revenue, a reminder that the value in composting flows not only from diversion but from the quality of the product at the end.
The ReFED grant upgrades Rust Belt Riders’ fleet to include a large commercial organics collection vehicle, the step-change that unlocks food manufacturers and institutional generators as viable customers. “From a company that started off on bicycles, we’ve really hit each tier,” Kurtz said. “And at each one of those steps, there’s a huge barrier, because to take the next step you need an immense amount of capital to procure the vehicle before you have the financial benefit to justify it.” The grant resolves that timing mismatch directly.
Kurtz also offered what may be the most important framing for how composting needs to be understood at the infrastructure level. Composting, to function as a genuine climate solution, has to stay local. “We don’t want to copy the same patterns we see in landfill management, where people are driving gas-powered vehicles across great distances and across state lines,” he said. “Keeping things local is still a super important mission of Rust Belt Riders, and as we continue to scale, those will be the examples and lessons we’ll be here to share with the rest of the community.” Lavoie arrived at the same place independently, observing that long-haul collection models that truck organic material across regions may register as diversion on paper while carrying environmental and economic costs that rarely get fully accounted for. The composting infrastructure that holds over time is geographically matched to the communities it serves.
Cracking the Permitting Problem
Dan Tietema, founder and CEO of Organicycle, has been in the waste industry for two decades and spent the first eight years of Organicycle’s existence as a hauler, collecting food waste from customers and delivering them to a third-party composter. When that third-party composter fell through, Tietema was forced to either walk away from a growing customer base or become a composter himself. He spent the years since learning that the hardest part of standing up a compost facility is rarely the composting itself but the regulatory process of getting a site approved and keeping it that way.
Organicycle is expanding its operational footprint from Grand Rapids to the Three Rivers region.
The partnership with WM at a Three Rivers, Michigan facility sidesteps that problem almost entirely. The site was already state-registered, already had an established relationship with regulators, and came with infrastructure that needed only an operation dropped into it. “We already had the partnership with WM established before the grant,” Tietema said. “The importance of the catalytic grant funding was to provide equipment necessary to deal with the material coming on site, doing this professionally, using best practices.” The ReFED capital funds a windrow turner and a wood tub grinder, equipment that enables Organicycle to handle third-party organic materials at commercial volumes and turn out finished compost in roughly two months rather than seven or eight. The model is intentionally replicable. WM controls composting-ready land across the country that has been sitting idle, and Organicycle is writing the playbook for what a credible operator partnership on those sites can look like.
Solving What Happens Inside the Pile
Black Earth Compost, headquartered in Massachusetts, has been working to solve contamination in the most efficient manner possible for the better part of 15 years. According to Andrew Brousseau, Partner & Compost Manager at Black Earth Compost, the industry has made significant investments in contamination reduction at the front end through collection program design, tip floor sorting, bag audits, and driver education. While these efforts are important and help reduce contamination, they are unlikely to eliminate it entirely. Likewise, technologies designed to remove contamination before composting have not always been able to capture everything that enters the system. As a result, Brousseau argues that composters should also focus on managing contamination after materials have entered the composting process. “Let the compost pile decide what’s compostable,” he noted “Let it break the stuff down. What remains is your non-compostable material. Pull that out.” Black Earth’s experience suggests that timing matters. When paired with aerated static pile (ASP) composting, removing contamination after approximately one month of active composting appears to provide the best results.
Material on Black Earth’s stationary pick station after one month of composting. Contaminants remain clearly visible, making the residual trash easy to identify and remove.
Black Earth’s approach also challenges the growing assumption that depackaging equipment is the only viable way to manage contamination in food waste streams. While depackagers can play an important role, they are often expensive and operationally complex, putting them out of reach for many small- and medium-sized composters. Brousseau argues that a simpler alternative exists. The composting process itself can be used to break down food scraps and certified compostable packaging, leaving the remaining contamination visible and easier to remove before conventional plastics have had time to fragment. In that sense, the stationary pick station is not simply a contamination-removal tool. It is a lower-cost alternative that preserves the ability for composting infrastructure to be developed at a variety of scales rather than requiring every facility to invest in multimillion-dollar processing systems.
The ReFED grant funds a mobile pick station that operationalizes exactly that logic. The intervention point is one month into the composting process, after certified compostable packaging has broken down but before rigid plastics have begun to fragment and shed microplastic particles. Brousseau noted that research conducted with Olin College showed that conventional plastic — in this case polyethylene (PE) — only deforms at one month into the compost pile and begins to shred at three months, which means the window for efficient removal is early in the process. The pick station concentrates contamination removal into a five- to eight-hour period once a week, replacing the continuous and labor-intensive surface-picking that composters currently rely on. Brousseau noted that the machine doubles as a stacker, serving multiple functions on a compost site rather than existing solely for contamination removal. Black Earth plans to make the equipment available to other composters, consistent with their longstanding practice of selling their collection and conveyor-truck delivery systems across the industry. As Conor Miller, CEO of Black Earth Compost, put it, “We want other compost companies to succeed against the big waste companies, which will be the default winner if compost companies our size can’t be as cost efficient.”
The Infrastructure Beneath the Infrastructure
The Compost Research & Education Foundation, known as CREF, occupies a different position in this cohort. Unlike the four composters, CREF received a traditional grant rather than a recoverable one, which reflects the nature of their work. CREF is not a business generating returns from operations; it is the research arm of the US Composting Council, advancing composting through research, education, and public outreach to build a more sustainable and resilient future. The project focuses on updating the Test Methods for the Examination of Composting and Compost, known as the TMECC, a document that is responsible for the scientific standards that create a foundational underpinning such that compost can be trusted, traded, compared, and regulated by using the same testing framework, regardless of who produced or measured it.” The methods have not been substantively revised since TMECC’s original publication in 2002, with many chapters drafted in 1996.
The grant specifically targets three parameters that composters, regulators, labs, and end users have been raising concerns about for years, namely pathogens, PFAS, and physical contamination including microplastics. Shelby Hoglund, TMECC Program Manager at CREF, described why standardization matters as a prerequisite to everything else. “Compost composition is important for the compost producer, regulators, and end-users so they know it is safe, efficacious, and beneficial for soil and plants.” Michele Francis, Associate TMECC Program Manager at CREF, extended that point by noting that without a standardized method, a test result from one lab cannot meaningfully be compared to a test result from another, which means the data cannot support regulatory limits, procurement specifications, research conclusions, or market trust at scale. The TMECC was originally written from the assumption that compost feedstocks were primarily yard trimmings and municipal solid waste, before food waste programs existed at scale, before compostable packaging was a meaningful fraction of the input stream, and before PFAS contamination was a known concern. The industry has changed substantially, and the methods need to catch up.
What Catalytic Capital Is Actually Doing
Collectively, these five projects describe a coherent strategy rather than a collection of individual bets. ReFED is not funding the largest composters or the most policy-advantaged markets. It is funding the operators and institutions doing foundational work in the places and at the scale where composting infrastructure is actually being built right now, before mandates, before easy economics, and before mainstream capital markets have decided that composting is worth underwriting at scale.
Veza was direct about what she hopes the recoverable grant structure communicates beyond the composting sector itself. “I want the industry to understand that [ReFED is] not just trying to get the money back,” she explained. “It is meant to help the broader industry, to think through how composters can become thriving businesses while still achieving their mission, and to be open to new forms of financing that can help them do both.”
That message is as much for the investors watching from the sidelines as it is for the composters themselves. What ReFED is assembling, grant by grant, is a pipeline of businesses with proven operations, demonstrated local demand, and enough financial history to be legible to growth-stage capital. The composters in this cohort are not waiting for that capital to find them. They are building the infrastructure that will make the case for it, and the case is getting stronger.
