P2P Featured in Glossy International Cycling Mag

photo: Steve Carey

Pedal to Petal: Sustainable Business Opportunities in Local Backyards
By Steve Carey, Momentum Magazine

In early 2008, Victoria activist Chris Johnson was homeless and looking for work, but he couldn’t find a job that fit his environmental values. At the time, the Capital Regional District was piloting a service where trucks picked up compostable waste and drove it to a waste station outside Victoria. That didn’t sit well with Johnson.

“I looked at this way of doing things, and saw how it required more new trucks, more diesel fuel, more electricity, and more water,” says Johnson. “I figured, wouldn’t it be better to process this food waste as close to where it is produced as possible, using as little fossil fuel energy as possible, and doing it as cheaply as possible?”

So with his one-speed 1950s Schwinn, a borrowed trailer from the Victoria Food Not Bombs collective, and a voice mailbox at a local shelter to take customer calls, Johnson created a hyper-local solution. Pedal to Petal is a service where cyclists come to customers’ homes to pick up a five-gallon bucket of kitchen waste for $5, then compost the waste into soil to grow food.

“It’s a way to reduce landfill waste, generate employment, and create edible landscapes in an urban environment,” says Matt Schultz, a University of Victoria environmental studies and math student who joined Johnson a little over six months ago. “We’ve got lofty goals, I guess.”

Schultz and Johnson now have more than 80 customers, ranging from apartment-dwellers to businesses. Most customers schedule two pickups a month, while some businesses are on a weekly pickup schedule.

All the kitchen waste goes to Schultz’s three-bin composter in his backyard. That’s where he turns the compost by hand, following the zero-emission goal of Pedal to Petal. Anticipating the future expansion of his business, Johnson is building a composter in a friend’s yard.

Ideally, Johnson and Schultz would like to see Pedal to Petal composters in backyards across the city, keeping the soil on-site or using it in nearby gardens to grow food for low-income people.

“The compost production can then remain small, no matter how large we get,” says Johnson. “Large compost facilities make lots of noise and odour and require lots of energy and water. This way is the least intrusive, as well as being the most sustainable.”

Johnson and Schultz plan to register Pedal to Petal (pedaltopetal.blogspot.com) as a cooperative, and to generate three part-time jobs over the summer for collective members. They don’t mind other people running with the concept of Pedal to Petal either – Johnson has friends in Winnipeg that want to start up their own version of the service.

“I hope that what we are doing can be an example to others of how to create opportunities for ourselves: How to solve problems in our communities beyond the limited power we have with voting and writing letters and making demands of politicians,” says Johnson. “See a problem? Create a co-operative social enterprise to fix it. I see the day of the non-profit model of environmentalism slipping away, and the need to build in ways to pay our bills as one of the only ways to keep us active on things such as climate change and waste.”