Meet Charlie BeJune of Camp Logan Compost Logistics

Today we’d like to introduce you to Charlie BeJune.

Charlie, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
In 2016, I started noticing how much food waste I was throwing in the trash, and had a friend with a garden who started a pile in her back yard, so we started collecting our food scraps, and I’d go visit her once a week. Then I got our neighbors involved, and our little operation grew beyond the capacity of her garden pile, so I started finding other gardens in the city who compost and asking if it were alright for me to bring my and my neighbors’ compost to their piles, and to my surprise, they THANKED me for making that effort. I figured they were doing the dirty work, so I thanked them.

When I later started working at a cafe and noticing how many HUNDREDS of pounds of coffee grounds and tea leaves and eggshells and bread bits were being thrown in the dumpster every day (attracting flies and bees and ants galore), I asked my boss if I could collect our kitchen’s scraps and bring them to the gardens where I brought my other compostable scraps. The garden volunteers seemed to be happy with the quality of compostable waste I was bringing them, so I started asking other cafes if they wanted to do the same thing. Every Monday, I’d drive my dirty little Prius around town, collecting buckets on buckets on buckets of coffee grounds, veggie scraps, and paper bits, and bring them to local community gardens, trying to design and redesign and refine a system of urban composting, to share with others. Some friends of mine thought the idea was fun and fulfilling, so we set them up with their own collection routes, and they became our first volunteers. We ran a private pilot program until we started seeing businesses popping up in and around Houston, and started supporting entrepreneurs, by listing them on our web site, offering collaborations, and directing the questions individuals emailing us about compost, with offers for support through new small businesses in this burgeoning green economy.

Today, we mostly work with outreach, answering questions about how to get signed up for curbside collection, or how to find a garden with a compost pile, and just what the heck compost is, anyway. In the future, we hope to work with more gardens and entrepreneurs to serve local communities better and provide community empowered means of wasting less. This year, we’re hoping to help integrate two gardens and a school compost program, with local communities and entrepreneurs, to help fertilize local green spaces for free, support small local economies, and encourage local urban Houstonians to improve their waste habits and waste less overall.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
HAHA. No. Pushing for this kind of hippie earthy-crunchy stuff in a Texas has not been easy. I have learned a lot about what it means to ask for help, and how people can say they want to help, but really just want to think of themselves as helpful, without putting any actual effort in and that’s an important lesson! It’s helped me realize that this is how people work – if it isn’t cheap and easy, people won’t do it. And that’s okay! I never wanted to force anyone to go through any additional work; designing an urban composting program means recognizing that it is unfair to require additional work from folks when they’re the one doing us – and the earth – the favor. Now that there’s a proven market, more and more Houstonians and Texans are getting in on the game, and finding ways to sell conscious convenience, we see more people composting than ever, and are so thrilled that all that struggle and frustration and hard days of coming up empty are finally coming to fruition. It’s also taught me a lot of patience – with myself most of all. Being a tipped wage earner, working three jobs and trying to run a UNA out of my own shallow pockets has been a real struggle.

There are weeks that I just can’t. I can’t afford the free buckets we give out to anyone who wants to compost, I can’t handle the inbox full of emails from folks who literally click the first button on our web site and don’t realize the answer to all their questions are on the next page, and rather just wait and hold me responsible for walking them through the basics of clicking two more buttons (another lesson in how people work!). Sometimes I can’t handle balancing a schedule full of meetings with professionals from all over town, and miss them and feel terrible that I lost an opportunity to take another step. Sometimes I just can’t meet every goal I set, but at the end of the day, no one can take away from me the fact that my friends and I are responsible for diverting thousands of pounds of waste from landfills, so with every “failure” I forgive myself this moment, and move on to the next one.

Please tell us about Camp Logan Compost Logistics.
Camp Logan Compost Logistics is a small Unincorporated Nonprofit Association and Compost Collective, which operates to connect those who wish to compost and waste less, with those who can help them achieve that goal, no matter where or how they live, or what their budgets are. We provide free air-tight buckets for folks willing to sort and transport their own waste to a local community garden, and are always growing our list and map of local community gardens with compost piles, to make it easy to find where to take your waste.

We also help connect folks to local compost haulers, who can provide curbside pickup much like our free pilot program for affordable monthly contributions to our burgeoning green economy. We’re also working to get more gardens composting, and would like to work with the City to include composting community gardens in their list of requirements for “complete” communities, as both a source of nutrition (most gardens grow edible and fruiting plants), and waste management (one small pile can process over a thousand pounds in as little as two weeks). We believe that compost is a part of our past that is also a part of our future and that living in a city is not an excuse to be wasteful.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
I think the flexibility with which we see the “issue” of urban composting is probably our best asset. We don’t really take “no” for an answer – we always ask, “why not?” Having worked in IT for so long, I’m not stranger to an angry rant, and have learned that negative feedback is incredibly valuable – it tells us “why not” which allows us to overcome obstacles that would otherwise mean someone “can’t” make this change. Seeing negative feedback this way, and finding flexible alternatives allows us to create systems that work anywhere – home, office, restaurant, grocer… anywhere there is vegetarian food waste, we can figure out a way to remove it responsibly.

Pricing:

• Self-sort and transport to community gardens – FREE! We’ll even give you a free container.
• Residential Curbside Compost Pickup and transport – $30-50 depending on location/capacity/hauler
• Commercial Curbside Compost Pickup and Transport – $50-150 depending on location/capacity/hauler

Contact Info:

• Website: https://camplogancompost.wixsite.com/home
• Email: camplogancompost@gmail.com
• Instagram: @camplogancompost

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