When you put food leftovers outside for collection, are you getting rid of waste or giving away a valuable resource that could be used right on your doorstep? For the founders of an award-winning community compost business, the answer is emphatically the latter, and they are building a circular system around it.
“Local growers take that compost, grow food that goes back to the cafes — and the waste comes back to us.” — Steph Robinson
Steph Robinson and ffin Jordao of Criw Compostio collect food waste from cafes and businesses that pay them, then convert it into peat-free compost that is returned to the community. "Local growers then take that compost, grow food that goes back to the cafes, cafes serve it, waste comes back to us and we turn it back into compost," said Steph. Once ready, it is offered on a "pay what you feel, pay what you can afford" basis, keeping value within the neighbourhood.
The pair met at the Centre for Alternative Technology, established more than fifty years ago by volunteers seeking to live without fossil fuels, which grew into a leading environmental charity. Biologist ffin, forty-three and originally from Portugal, moved to Wales to work in its biology department, while Steph, forty-nine, moved from England to run the centre's short-courses programme, bringing a background in diversity, systems analysis and project management.
Criw Compostio grew out of a project ffin began with a grant from the Shared Prosperity Fund in 2022. Further funding has let them focus on research and development and set up a composting school to help other communities start similar projects. All composting is done at their base in Machynlleth, keeping transport miles to a minimum.
The business picks up waste twice a week, along with wood shavings from a carpentry firm and used rabbit and guinea-pig bedding from pet owners. By treating food waste as a resource akin to water, the compost champions argue, communities can build resilience, cut emissions from transport, and reconnect people with the provenance of what they eat.
The economics are deliberately modest. Collection fees from cafes cover the running costs; the "pay what you feel" model on the finished compost is possible because the raw material arrives as revenue rather than expense. That inversion — being paid to receive your inputs — is what most conventional composting operations lack, and it is the detail visiting community groups ask about first at the pair's composting school.
The pair's composting school opens the model to any community willing to copy it — which was, from the start, the point.
The interesting number in community composting is transport miles, because collection logistics are where municipal systems lose both money and carbon. Hyper-local loops like Criw Compostio's sidestep that entirely, which is why the model scales by replication rather than expansion — a hundred small schemes, not one big one. The composting school is therefore the real product; the compost is the demonstration.
