Break It Down: Waste Company Finds Success with Ethical Values

“Three years ago my wife was work­ing for a yoga stu­dio in town, and they served drinks in cups dur­ing class,” Jeff told Organic Connections. “They had just switched from cups that weren’t decom­pos­able to a com­postable sugar- cane cup—but they were still just throw­ing them away because they didn’t have any option to com­post. They asked if we could find an option for them. We looked all over town and found no one offer­ing com­post­ing, and we thought, `Hmm, maybe we could offer com­post­ing.’ We started as a pilot and picked them up, then added a sec­ond account and then a third account. It became our full-time occupation.”

Diverting from Landfills

After Break It Down began to achieve some suc­cess, Jeff and Melanie became more aware of their competition—and real­ized that in order to sur­vive, they had to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves. First, they found a way to take cer­tain items for recy­cling that other recy­cling companies—including the city—would not. “Our ware­house is totally dif­fer­ent from the indus­try stan­dard; we sep­a­rate every­thing by hand,” Jeff explained. “Because we oper­ate this way, we offer the abil­ity to recy­cle as many things as pos­si­ble. We’ll take bags of plas­tic, bags of clean Styrofoam and bags of pack­ing peanuts. We can take milk car­tons, asep­tic [com­mer­cially ster­ile] pack­ag­ing, and any kinds of met­als. We can take coat hang­ers and wire, the type of stuff that gets caught up in an indus­trial sys­tem. We can take any kind of hard plas­tic, because we can dif­fer­en­ti­ate plas­tic by hand a lot more eas­ily than a machine can.”

Operating in this fash­ion has meant more cus­tomers and a higher rate of diver­sion from the land­fills. “Instead of max­i­miz­ing profit, our goal is to max­i­mize our client list,” said Jeff. “This has resulted not only in clients but also in approx­i­mately a 99+ per­cent diver­sion. We bring in about 100 tons of mate­r­ial a month and we end up hav­ing to throw out maybe a half ton a month in trash. Larger com­pa­nies will brag when they are over 95 per­cent diver­sion rate, and we just blow that away.”

Break It Down’s service-oriented approach extends as well to their com­post col­lec­tion. “We really try to tai­lor the ser­vice to every­one inde­pen­dently,” Jeff con­tin­ued. “That has caused us to offer as many dif­fer­ent options as we can. We use 55-gallon bar­rels for a lot of food waste. But we have clients who don’t gen­er­ate enough to need one of those, so we also have a small 12-gallon roll cart for some of the food trail­ers in town and also for res­i­dents. The area I’m most excited about with these is that we set them up indoors in office commissaries.”

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The Greatest Good for All

The company’s atten­tion to ser­vice has cer­tainly paid off. “We’ve had a good response,” Jeff said. “We don’t even have sig­nage on our trucks right now, and we’ve been grow­ing at pretty much full capac­ity for a year and a half. Local small-business own­ers con­sti­tute 99 per­cent of our clients, and word of mouth in the local small-business com­mu­nity has been par­tic­u­larly helpful.”

The future for Break It Down is planned the same way as the com­pany began: the great­est good for all con­cerned. “We’re going to con­tinue to grow our core com­post and recy­cling busi­ness,” Jeff con­cluded. “Beyond that, I think there is a huge poten­tial to divert com­post to live­stock pro­duc­tion. There is a small group of peo­ple here that we’ve been talk­ing with about a food recov­ery effort too, to divert the best qual­ity food waste to human consumption—specifically food banks, soup kitchens and that kind of thing. Some of the quote ‘food waste’ we pick up is com­pletely edi­ble and it’s just that the expi­ra­tion date has passed.

“This is the kind of thing I love because our eth­i­cal val­ues about waste are in full align­ment with our eco­nomic goals. Any new pro­gram that comes out of here is not only bet­ter for the envi­ron­ment, it’s bet­ter for our bot­tom line too. I don’t know if it was by acci­dent or just because that has always been the goal from day one; but it’s really nice to not have too many oppor­tu­ni­ties come up in which we need to either ‘do what’s right’ and lose money or `do what’s wrong’ and save money. It’s very grat­i­fy­ing to just have those fac­tors in align­ment like that.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit breakitdownaustin.org.