WasteNot Compost’s Liam Donnelly Dreams Big

Liam Donnelly’s dreams are electric. His company WasteNot Compost, offers zero-emissions compost collection service for residential and business clients in the Chicago area.

In this Q&A, Donnelly, CEO and founder, and Waste360 40 Under 40 award winner, discusses how he started WasteNot Compost as a teen, and how his commitment to sustainability has continued to be a driving force for the growing company.

Waste360: What is the business model and problem you started your company to solve?
Liam Donnelly: I grew up composting in my backyard. I thought it was normal. I was raised composting, and I thought most people in Chicago probably did it, too. I got into food service when I was 14 at a pretty sustainable cafe, a sustainable business, and realized that there wasn't an easy composting solution. I think I was just excited about the opportunity to start taking these coffee grounds home and adding them to my compost pile.

My boss offered to start paying me to do it, and that was pretty cool. I thought the guy was going to tell me to stop when he realized I was doing more work composting than I was being paid to work in the kitchen. I didn't think it was going to be a business. I didn't have a driver's license, so I was doing all these collections on bicycle.

Other business owners would see me on this bike. It was ridiculous, a six-foot-long trailer, 40 inches wide steel thing with a ramp on the back, hauling around garbage carts and buckets. They started coming in and asking, “Who's your compost kid?” Which really offended me back then. But they wanted to pay for a composting service, too. They were really excited about this idea.

Our business problem is that food waste goes to landfill. There's a lot of people that want to keep their food waste out of landfills, but composting is seen as dirty. It's seen as a chore, and it does require some space and some time. For many people that are aware that food waste going to the landfill is a bad thing, it's still not bad enough for them to want to compost on their own and take on that journey. With businesses, it's a little bit harder, just with the pure volume of food waste, but we're trying to make compost as clean and accessible as possible.

Waste360: Can you talk about your company's commitment to sustainability and zero emissions?

Liam Donnelly: When I started it was zero emissions out of necessity, because I was 15. Obviously, I couldn't drive legally. As the business really became a business, I realized that we should probably be delivering sustainability sustainably. That meant thinking about how we were going to grow and expand and hire our first collector, our first driver. I tried hiring cyclists back at the beginning, and paid them really well, but it was a terrible job. I mean, it was grueling winter; 100-degree days. I went on the search for an electric van and eventually found one that fit our needs.

We became the first electric zero emissions compost collection service. We accumulated quite a few of those vans. We now operate a fleet of over 30 electric collection units, both small, Class 4 vans, all the way up to Class 7 trucks.

We're 100% zero emissions. All of our vehicles are battery electric, and, the services we offer are a commitment to sustainability. Our whole business revolves around greenhouse gas emission reduction. Whether that's in the communities we serve with our collection vehicles or it's the idea of taking food waste out of landfills and eliminating the production of methane.

Waste360: What are some of the challenges you tackle in your role as a company leader?

Liam Donnelly: There's a lot of them. Whether it's as simple as convincing people that composting isn't dirty, such as with the enterprise accounts and restaurant groups and school districts that want to compost, but they're still too afraid. Or the more complicated and honestly more exciting problems of right-sizing and creating an electric fleet, finding waste bodies, refuse bodies, that work well with compostable waste and also electric vehicles.

Then there's the challenges of running electric in the day-to-day. How we plan our routes to maximize the use of the limited range on some of our electric trucks, how we play around with gross vehicle weight ratings and the higher curb weight that we experience with electric trucks while also the higher payloads that we're doing with organics. It's the heaviest, the wettest, densest portion of the waste stream. Then we're putting it into what is now the heaviest waste collection vehicles, battery and electric.

It's a lot of innovation, it's a lot of doing things for the first time. We're doing things that nobody else has done before. You weren't able to get electric garbage trucks a few years ago. Everybody was talking about them, but if you tried to buy them, nobody was delivering. Now we're at a point where manufacturers are delivering for the first time, but we're doing things a little bit differently. We're taking a heavier waste stream; we're not doing municipal solid waste.

Waste360: What are some things on the horizon for your company that you're excited about?

Liam Donnelly: I think for our company, I'm very excited about the opportunity to expand outside the city of Chicago and outside of the state of Illinois. We've been talking about it for a long time, and we're on the cusp of doing it. It wouldn't have been possible two years ago with the availability of electric collection vehicles, but now, we finally have the ability to take our service and bring it to other municipalities across the country.

Another thing that excites me is also the fact that municipalities are embracing compost collection for the first time. We went from no municipal franchise agreements a year and a half ago to, currently, five municipal franchise agreements.

Waste360: What advice would you give to a young professional interested in starting a career in the waste industry?

Liam Donnelly: I was frequently told nobody is going to separate their organics in a commercial kitchen. I was told that electric vehicles would never work in my business — it’s not going to happen. But, I wanted to try and make it happen.

This is an industry that embraces innovation, and what that allows for is trying to do things outside the box. I think that's the piece of advice, not to be afraid to do it. Just because it's been done one way for the last several decades doesn't mean it's going to be done that way next year. That's what we're seeing a lot of right now, not just in the organics space, but across the waste industry, as a whole.