Little Green Bucket owner Brad Weikel started his environmentally conscious Albuquerque composting company from the ground up, and six years later, he is seeking community investments to help grow its proposed new facility.
“People are itching to do things that benefit the environment, and they often feel pretty paralyzed — they feel powerless,” Weikel said. “Other than getting an electric car and putting solar on your roof, food waste is probably the next most significant thing that you can work on.”
When Weikel founded the company in 2018, Albuquerque was the largest metropolitan area that didn’t have a residential collection service for compostables, he said.
“I just saw that there was an opportunity there and just kind of ran with it,” Weikel said.
The company started with gathering compost waste from farmers’ markets and front porches.
According to Weikel, composting is one of the cheapest ways for the community to help with its environmental impacts. There are two consequences of sending waste to a landfill: methane emissions and a waste of nutrients. If food ends up in the landfill, its nutrients stay there forever, he said.
“If we instead turn it into compost, it comes back around and feeds the next round of crops that are grown on it,” Weikel said.
In dry places like Albuquerque, water retention is also a challenge, he said. Sandy soil doesn’t contain many nutrients, so adding that back into the ground via composting helps mitigate this.
After a few years, Little Green Bucket started adding commercial service for restaurants and small businesses. Last month, it launched a bond program and began taking investments to expand and acquire a new processing facility so that it can sell finished compost in a community space where people can gather.
“Once we have a compost yard and we have regular customers coming and going, we see an opportunity to really lean into our community-centered identity and start incubating other projects,” Weikel said.
On April 8, the City of Albuquerque started a pilot project collaborating with Little Green Bucket. The McKinley Community Center in the Northeast Heights will collect compost from up to 60 households. The households will receive a starter toolkit to help with household composting, and Little Green Bucket will move the compost to its facility. The project is using the community center as a centralized location where people can compost without having to add extra transportation to their routines, according to Environmental Health Department Sustainable Waste Specialist Sandra West. The project pairs composting with education, she said.
“More importantly than just composting everything, is to — when possible — prevent food waste altogether,” West said.
The starter toolkit includes an informational packet on preventing food waste from the root cause. Prevention can include organizing your fridge in a way that allows you to eat older food before it goes bad and needs to be composted, West said. The project launched formally on April 9, and just a day later, it was halfway to its capacity of 60 involved households, she said.
“We intentionally are starting this just with communities that use that area, and slowly growing it, because we only have the capacity to support up to 60 households,” West said.
Aside from household sustainability, Little Green Bucket focuses on composting for commercial customers. Right now, one of its largest commercial customers is the University of New Mexico, where Director of Sustainability Anne Jakle is in charge of making UNM more environmentally friendly. UNM has worked with Little Green Bucket since 2023, and it has composted more than 200 tons of food waste since then, she said.
“Little Green Bucket is a crucial partner in our waste diversion efforts,” Jakle said. “They’re a really important part of this community, and they run a really great operation.”
UNM’s food prep culture has a focus on sustainability and composting in the back of house, she said. The catering options and dining hall compost all of their food scraps and other compostable material. In the dining hall, leftover food is also composted.
Food waste is a big contributor of methane emissions, which is a potent greenhouse gas, Jakle said. UNM has a smaller pilot project in which an undergraduate student is collecting compost from five smaller food locations throughout campus, such as the Subway in the Student Union Building and in the markets throughout campus.
“It’s a huge diversion of waste from the landfill,” Jakle said. “We’re hopeful to expand operations compost in the future here at UNM and hope to continue to be able to partner with Little Green Bucket on all of that.”
UNM had been composting with a commercial hauling company called Soilutions since before its collaboration with Little Green Bucket. In 2023, Little Green Bucket took over the commercial hauling. Jakle said this filled a need for community composting at a greater-than-residential scale.
UNM food employees are trained in composting, and it is viewed as an expectation, Jakle said. Little Green Bucket makes it convenient for the university to collect waste without needing to manage the actual composting aspect of it as a university.
“We’ve loved working with them, so we’re excited for this new iteration of their business,” Jakle said. “We’re really excited to partner with them in the new chapter of it.”
Weikel said the new facility is needed so the company can continue to grow. The bond program that Little Green Bucket launched last month allows the community to invest in the new facility. Investments are mostly in the $5,000 to $10,000 range, and they have come from existing membership. The six-year bonds would earn its buyers a 6% interest.
“It’s a sort of novel approach, in that we’re inviting the general public to invest in a local business at a comparatively small scale,” Weikel said.
The goal was to raise at least $250,000, Weikel said, and after a month, the company is closing in on $200,000.
“It’s been going pretty well, and we’re pretty confident that we’ll get to that minimum goal before too long, and that we’ll actually be able to achieve liftoff,” Weikel said.
The company has started its land search for the new facility, and it hopes to be able to start composting at the new facility as early as June. The community-based aspects of the facility will include education and collaboration with local artists. It plans to start a recycling plant that will educate people on plastics, how they work and how recycling does — and doesn’t — work, he said. This could help turn some of the “trickier” plastics into materials that local artists can use to make furniture or jewelry.
“We’ve got a lot of other ideas that are diverging from compost itself and getting more into just sustainability and circularity within the community,” Weikel.
Composting is a way of allowing people to take action on climate change affordably and feasibly at a family scale. The core of the company is to create a space for the community to meet its waste management needs and educate itself on achieving sustainability goals.
“The core of our mission is to be of service to local residents,” Weikel said. “We’re just really excited to move forward with it.”
To learn more about Little Green Bucket or to get involved in its Full Sun Acceleration Bonds program, go to littlegreenbucket.com.