Our Story
Louisville Compost Coop has deep roots in this community, and they sprouted from Heine Brothers Coffee grounds. More than 20 years ago, in search of a more responsible way to dispose of his coffee shop leftovers, Gary Heine first experimented with vermiculture – using worms to break down the used grounds into fertilizer. But Gary discovered that worms dined sluggishly on a diet of coffee alone. In 2005, he and his partner Mike Mays sought the help of the staff at Wild Oats, an organic grocery store in St. Matthews. The idea was to add food waste to the coffee grounds to entice the worms, and they wanted a source that contained no pesticides. Brian Barnes, who worked at the store while attending the University of Louisville, was assigned to team up with them. Brian has been composting ever since.
Gary and Mike formed a nonprofit group, Breaking New Grounds, to support composting and urban farming, and this was an immersive learning experience for Brian. In 2009, he was pursuing his doctorate in philosophy at UofL when he drove by a collection of empty dumpsters near the campus. Brian began to wonder about whether the university would be interested in letting him collect food scraps from the cafeterias and use the dumpsters to aerate the compost. He knew it might be a tough sell; at that time, there wasn’t even a recycling program in place on campus. But a conversation with the new UofL sustainability director, Justin Mog, led to an agreement in 2010 to use the food and the site. With help from friends and student volunteers wielding pitchforks, Brian says, the fledgling enterprise soon “got a little reputation for making good dirt.”
Then the ground shifted. The university decided to sell its food waste to a corporation that composted on a much larger scale. Meanwhile, Heine Brothers’ nonprofit disbanded and the business asked Brian to collect its coffee grounds again. Other coffee shops and campus businesses also wanted to participate, and the volunteer work continued; but it wasn’t clear how the new business model would work long-term. Then Sean Raph, who had come to UofL to study toxicology, approached Brian with the idea of using five-gallon buckets to collect household compostables and charge a small fee for the service. Brian and Sean formed a partnership, in close concert with UofL Sustainability, and the Louisville Compost Co-op was born. Nearly 10 years later, our mission hasn’t changed, but our impact continues to multiply.
