Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Corey & Amber McCool. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Corey & Amber, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

My wife Amber and I have always been very interested in self-reliance and sustainable living. In the past few years alone, we’ve raised goats, chickens, ducks, pigs, and Tilapia, along with our ever-growing garden. With all of those animals, a fair amount of animal bedding and waste started to pile up. That is how we initially got into composting.

It wasn’t long before we decided to reach out to our neighbors to see if they would be interested in a food scrap collection & composting service. One week later, with a few subscribing customers, Purple Bucket Compost was in business.

In order to give a business like this a chance to succeed overhead costs much be kept low, so we’ve always focused on creating a simple business with minimal expenses. . Where traditional composting facilities rely on large plots of land and heavy equipment/machinery, our system can be performed by a single person without much more than a few buckets, a vehicle, and a shovel.

Part of our system includes building partnerships with local businesses & organizations that can host our self-service food scrap drop-off sites. Each site is composed of a small box/bench holding 8x five-gallon Purple Buckets. Customers enroll online, receive the access code, and then swap Purple Buckets filled with food scraps for empty Purple Buckets as often as they like. Our partner businesses support our ecofriendly mission AND enjoy the additional traffic created by composters dropping off their buckets. Our community partners are the key to making this work!

After 2 years, we now operate 8 drop-off locations in the Evergreen, Conifer, and Bailey areas. We’ve processed over 40 tons of food scraps, with the collection rate increasing every day. We have compost pilot programs in 2 local elementary schools, and we provide commercial service to Starbucks, local restaurants, and offices building. Now, as we continue to serve our local customers, we’re looking at ways to grow our impact into other unserved communities by growing our network of hyper-local composters.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My wife and I, both veterans of the US Air Force, kind of fell into this business. We were trying to provide a small service to our neighbors, but were quickly receiving requests for service in dozens of homes, restaurants, and offices. There was clearly an opportunity, as most organics haulers don’t provide service outside of the larger metro areas, leaving most of the foothills unserved.

Unlike the haulers that are most associated with compost collection services, we compost the materials ourselves. If contamination exists we remove it. Haulers, on the other hand, may have entire truckloads redirected to the landfill, as the composting lots often refuse loads with visible contamination from plastic, metal, or even paper.

Our mission is to take this approach into other unserved communities. By sharing our approach, and by continuously working to remove the obstacles that are keeping people from composting, we’ll be able to create jobs while also creating more sustainable communities.

Have you ever had to pivot?

We came into our composting adventure with the initial goal of providing a food scrap recycling option for our neighborhood in Bailey. It wasn’t long before we were receiving requests from residents in Conifer, then Evergreen, and beyond. We now operate 8 different self-service Purple Bucket Exchange Stations in the foothills west of Denver. We just finished our 2nd year of business, processing 5+ tons of food scraps in 2021, and over 35 tons in 2022. We expect to process in excess of 50 tons in 2023.

Growth brings additional challenges. The added volume requires more space (land), more equipment, more employees, greater regulatory concerns, etc… But does it make sense to centralize growth in that way?

Our focus has shifted towards removing the obstacles to entry that are preventing new composters from entering the market. We want to make it so easy to become a composter in Colorado, that it could be a side hustle for anyone with the will to make a difference, or a full-time business for those that see the vast opportunity. How many more people will be willing to participate if composting is the ONLY requirement? If we provide a platform that declutters the path towards owning a backyard composting business, markets their business, processes payments, allows for peers to share methods, ideas, and lessons learned, how many would be willing to try then? It can be overwhelming to start a business, but joining a movement is different. Being able to start the journey on an established path allows new composters to focus on composting and spreading the word, not on building a website, learning accounting, or questioning whether or not they registered their business appropriately. Look at how much easier it is to work your side hustle with Uber or Lyft, versus starting your own taxi company. We believe there are people willing to join the mission. Now it’s up to us to remove the obstacles that are stopping them.

With that goal in mind, we are very excited to have been chosen to participate in NextCycle Colorado 2023, a business accelerator designed to improve the end markets for recovered commodities and organic materials in Colorado. With a lot of hard work and the guidance of experts from across the state, we look forward to growing our Colorado composting community. We urge anyone in Colorado with any interest in operating their own micro-composting business to reach out. Through grants and other funding options, a committed composter can cover many or all of the startup costs. Reach out early and we’ll keep you posted as things progress.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

We started Purple Bucket Compost without much more than 20 Purple Buckets, a few pallets, and a pitch fork. We put the buckets on a credit card and built our compost bins using the free pallets. It’s easy to look at trash and recycling operations and imagine that the same scale of approach is required for organics processing. That’s simply not true. Composting is a natural process that will occur on its own whenever basic requirements are met. Specialized equipment is not required. In fact, people were composting for many hundreds of years before the combustion engine was created. As a composter, our job is to monitor and manage a few variables like the mix of inputs, moisture levels, and air flow, in order to maximize the quality of the output. Over time, high quality compost is created, replacing the pile of food scraps. By keeping the process simple and the scale small, the startup costs can be kept quite low, while allowing for rapid scalability. When it’s time to grow, it can be as simple as adding a few more Purple Buckets and another pallet bin. The only things that you really need to get started are a few tools, many of which are in your garage already, and the commitment to do the work.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.PurpleBucketCompost.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/purplebucketcompost/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PurpleBucketCompost