Harvest Cycle uses cargo bikes to keep spoiled food from landfill

Try to picture 76 tons of food waste. (Or 68 metric tons). You might imagine 20 dumpsters full of rotting leftovers, or a mound the size of a tugboat. All that precious organic matter, hauled off to the landfill, buried with the regular garbage.

Or not: In 2021, Harvest Cycle collected 152,000 pounds of uneaten food for composting. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Harvest Cycle is a door-to-door service for residents who want to compost but can’t necessarily do it themselves.

What’s more, instead of driving a truck, haulers pedal a cargo bike.

“We tend to get applicants who are avid bikers,” says Ella Kilpatrick Kotner, the program’s coordinator. “Most of the haulers we’ve had in the past bike for transportation. A couple of them have been bike mechanics, which is an added bonus. But for the most part, they’re people living their lives and using their bikes to get places.”

Harvest Cycle started as Sol Chariots, a worker-owned pedicab company that offered a variety of services, from tours to home delivery. The start-up was short-lived, but the idea of compost pickup appealed to Groundwork Rhode Island, the local chapter of the national sustainability network Groundwork USA. This concept became Harvest Cycle, which Groundwork took over in 2018.

The architect behind Harvest Cycle was Katie Murphy, who refined the service, hired and trained haulers, and cultivated interest. When Murphy started as coordinator, the program had only a handful of subscribers; thanks to her efforts, Harvest Cycle now has about 350.

“Katie did such amazing things with this program,” says Kotner, who took over her role in 2021, when Murphy moved to Spain to pursue a master’s degree. “She built partnerships, was the main force behind the new facility we are developing, and overall did so, so much. She’s a really amazing person.”

Today, Harvest Cycle relies on a single cargo bike, which is equipped with an electric-assist motor and an additional trailer. Two haulers ride the tangled streets of Providence, picking up buckets from subscribers’ homes and offices. Haulers use a special app to manage their routes and catalog the weight of their loads. The food scraps are then brought to a community garden, where they are composted into fresh, arable soil.

“I love to see the transformation,” says Tetee Kromah, a primary compost processor for Groundwork. Kromah grew up in Liberia and came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1991. Kromah trained in compost processing in Rhode Island, but she remembers, back in her home country, helping her grandmother reuse kitchen scraps in her garden. “We would take turns turning the dirt, right in the banana field. I was watching her [when] I was a kid, and I really liked stuff like that.”

At the moment, Harvest Cycle haulers pedal about 3,600 miles (5,793 kilometers) per year, but these numbers may grow significantly. Groundwork plans to build a “medium-scale” processing facility in Providence, which should be operational in the next one to two years. The West End Hub will radically enlarge Groundwork’s composting operations and provide multi-purpose space for events and education as well.

Kotner herself grew up in Hawaii and came to Rhode Island to study Environmental Science at Brown University. She was excited to find the Harvest Cycle position at Groundwork and considers it a perfect fit. On top of her work coordinating routes and pickups, Kotner has a strong relationship with the bicycle.

“I am a cyclist for transportation, mostly,” she says. “I don’t have a car. I’m not like a cyclist for exercise, usually, but I definitely use it for functionality. And I’m very passionate about improving bike infrastructure in the city, for sure.”

To learn more about Harvest Cycle, visit GroundWorkRI.org/harvest-cycle-compost.