A friend's family runs a small waste management business that specializes in composting food waste from restaurants and institutions. By far their biggest ongoing difficulty is maintaining driving staff. It's not a very attractive job and most of who they hire have criminal backgrounds and unstable lives. It's good for society that there's a job available for this group that most employers will not give a chance but it's also a difficult group to manage consistent staffing levels. Just something to keep in mind if you start expanding and need drivers.

Generally speaking waste collectors, totally exploit the labor force like this to largely their own detriment

To the point where they’re paying drivers helpers salaries in order to drive down their hourly wage to about five dollars an hour because they have no options

Really good commercial hauler drivers that do 20 yard rolloffs and have been doing it for a long time can make upwards of $50 an hour, but that’s because they know how to play the game

Our goal is To provide pathways to ownership for these collection routes for the driver and drivers helper themselves such that each of them can make collectively upwards of $300,000 a year and then own their own truck and route and everything that comes out of that

I've seriously wondered about this. Tell us more. Do you just act as a private middleman to get things to the dump? Do you sort or resell?

Yes it’s a private subscription based hauler like like Waste Connection, Waste Management etc…

However, we’re only ever going to do residential because the goal is to grow ownership of waste infrastructure to employees of the cooperative and cooperators, as well as homeowners with returns on their recycling and any other services

Eventually, the goal is to provide all community services, including banking and general services that you would expect a city to provide.

Currently none of the governments in the United States are functional enough to provide the services necessary at broad enough scale, so we’re bootstrapping it ourselves

This is fascinating. I love that your goal is to compete with the status quo US services and society without apology. Good luck!

Thank you.

We’re opinionated that we need to organize in order to create the structures that support everyone living fulfilled lives.

Perhaps this is not what you want, but Codie Sanchez did a business breakdown with an indepedent waste collector: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMG6vtscSeI

Wow, can you expand on that? Thanks!

I’d also like to know more about what you do.

See my above comments

Also seegull.org

See my other comments above, but basically were creating alternative infrastructure to the existing capitalist infrstructure starting with residential waste handling services in northern Virginia