Jonathan Deutsch, the head of Drexel University’s Food Lab, likes to challenge his culinary arts students with cauliflower stems and other trimmings they too-hastily discard. “I’ll pull things out of the compost bin and I’ll say, ‘Look at this. What could we do with this?’” Deutsch asks the students what they could make with the
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Full disclosure: I am a business partner in Bennett Compost and have been for over 10 years. Like the guy who claimed he liked his electric shaver so much that he bought the company, so too was I drawn to this business from the get-go. It was just an irresistible idea. Tim Bennett, ever smiling
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In a former municipal building on Rising Sun Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia, cycling enthusiast Rudi Saldia is doing something he never imagined: working at a desk. It was a long and winding road—well, often a straight road on a grid—that led him to Bennett Compost’s Lawncrest headquarters. Before the days of DoorDash and Grubhub, he
MoreUrban farmer and MacArthur Grant recipient Will Allen on the importance of greens, worms and moreby Lee Stabert
Everything about Will Allen is big. The pro basketball player turned urban agriculture iconoclast has hands like baseball mitts, and arms like tree trunks. His normal uniform—jeans, baseball hat, hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves removed—only serves to emphasize
A local company helps Philly businesses jump on the composting bandwagon by Lee StabertThere is one word showing up left and right on the lips of top urban sustainability and food access experts: compost. To hear them speak of it, the stuff is magic—now it’s just a matter of getting the rest of society on
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A local company forsakes peat
All gardeners use potting soil,” says mark Highland, president of Organic Mechanics. “Why not use a local product?” Founded in 2006, the company, located just outside of Coatesville, makes a variety of soils for every level of planter—from large organic farms to botanical gardens to recreational gardeners.
Marvin Dixon takes lessons learned on a farm to the luxury hotel businessby Char Vandermeer
If the typical luxury hotel is a gaping hole of conspicuous consumption, then Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Hotel is anything but. With its hugely successful composting program, a commitment to reusing cooking oil, an aggressive commingled recycling program and a brand-new cogeneration
Turn waste into black goldby Will DeanIf you’re reading this magazine, you probably have at least have a vague idea of what composting is. The natural way to make nutritious (for plants, that is) fertilizer, composting was once a standard practice for every farmer, gardener and consumer.
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