Our planet has been yearning for change. The signs are clear, and if you are reading this you’re likely aware that this change is long overdue. You are also likely aware that modern composting is a movement that is crucial to the future health of our planet. That is why EcoRich has spent each day since its inception trying to spread awareness and educate individuals, business owners, and corporations about on-site composting. Nevertheless, we understand that this movement cannot truly spread and reach its potential without being made as accessible as possible.
The environmentally conscious mindset is certainly spreading, and for good reason. Nevertheless, our mission considers a much larger scale and requires us to find ways to motivate even those who are not already invested in sustainability efforts. That is why our composters are designed to be as fast and easy to use as possible, so we can maximize food waste diversion from landfills. We want to convince people from all different backgrounds and walks of life that composting is not a burden. Rather, it is a seamless and fulfilling lifestyle and business-practice change that can be easily achieved. By doing so, we believe that composting can reach its mainstream potential and truly affect change on a nation-wide scale.
However, in order to divert food waste from landfills and recycle it at such a large scale and at the speed that is required, some concessions must be made. As a company, our first priority is to manage food waste in a simple way that decreases our use of landfills and reduces the environmental impact of transporting it. However, the result of our accelerated process is a slight drop in the quality of the compost when compared to more traditional methods and timeframes. However, the idea that the final product in our process is just dehydrated food waste is a misconception: in reality, it is technically referred to as a ‘soil amendment’. This term was suggested to EcoRich by the Pennsylvania EPA, as we found that the result of our large-scale method would lead to input variability. When so many food waste producers are responsible for what goes into an EcoRich machine, the quality of results is inevitably too varied to generalize. Ultimately, our final product has been tested in reports from AASL at Penn State and the HI New York City Hostel. This dip in quality is an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice if we want everyone, including businesses and corporations, to start recycling their food waste. Traditional composting methods, while they do manage to produce high-quality compost, simply require too much land and labor to be a viable large-scale solution.
EcoRich fully recognizes that the quality of compost is of the utmost importance for those whose goal is to practice the purest form of composting. However, we cannot lose sight of the bigger picture, which is eliminating our rampant use of landfills and the resulting environmental impact that they have on our roads and our air quality. Our goal is simple, and the path is quite clear, it is now time to act as fast and efficiently as we can before it is too late.
Manish Desai, Founder, and President, EcoRich LLC - manish.desai@ecorichenv.com
