Meet Kat Nigro of CompostNow

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kat Nigro.

Hi Kat, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
CompostNow was founded in 2011, in Raleigh, North Carolina. As part of a growing grassroots movement to rebuild soil health, our team saw an opportunity to create a more circular system by diverting food waste from landfills and using that to create nutrient-rich compost for our community.

When we started, our team collected food waste from homes in personal vehicles and washed buckets outdoors. These early years helped our team form a strong connection with our community, and laid a foundation for local partnerships that allowed us to turn food scraps into compost, and cycle nutrients back into the soil.

As we grew, we joined forces with other businesses across the Southeast and Midwest. This helped us expand our knowledge and understanding of the organics recycling industry, and allowed us to diversify our team’s perspective. These expansions made our company stronger, our operations more resilient, and our team better equipped to tackle the challenges of a rapidly evolving industry.

Even as we expanded and diversified our service offerings and capabilities, our commitment to improving soil in our community and quality of life for our team guided our decision-making processes. We have continuously sought to improve the working conditions, pay, and quality of life benefits for our team members and have designed our operations and technology to be more efficient, impactful, and transparent as we have scaled.

Today, we are thrilled to offer elevated pay for all employees; expanded time-off programs that include paid holiday, vacation days, and sick leave; 401k programs; and health benefits for full-time team members. We envision a circular system that takes care of our community in a holistic way, including the wellbeing and health of our team.

As a testament to our belief in a closed-loop system that nurtures the planet, we have prioritized returning compost to local gardens and farms through our Compost Give Back and Garden Partner Program. Meanwhile, our belief in transparent and efficient systems is supported by our in-house software, which tracks and shares the personal diversion data of our members, manages our hauling and logistics, and supports the distribution of compost back into our community.

Through the collective impact of the households, businesses, and communities we serve, millions pounds of food and organic waste have been diverted from landfills and turned into locally distributed compost.

For over a decade, we have been committed to cycling nutrients back into our soil, and have stayed grounded in our principles to take care of people and planet. As we continue to grow, it’s your trust and support that fuels our mission to transform the way food and organic waste is managed.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It hasn’t always been a smooth road – like many purpose-driven organizations, we’ve faced our fair share of challenges. One of the biggest hurdles was, and is, educating the public on why composting matters and how to do it correctly. Shifting behavior around waste disposal isn’t easy, and it requires a lot of creative outreach, patience, and trust-building in the communities we serve.

Operationally, building a logistics model for organics collection that’s both scalable and sustainable took years of iteration. We’ve had to overcome everything from contamination issues to seasonal route disruptions to establishing our own commercial-scale composting facility. More recently, we’re also navigating rising costs in transportation and materials, which has forced us to rethink how to remain accessible while continuing to grow our impact. We’ve had to evaluate our pricing models, optimize our routes, and invest in operational efficiencies – all while preserving the integrity of our mission.

In addition, the recent federal funding freeze has impacted municipal composting initiatives and partnerships, creating new obstacles for expanding infrastructure and public access to composting. This has placed more pressure on private programs like ours to fill the gaps and continue advocating for systems-level change, even when external support is limited.

Through it all, what’s kept us going is our community – and our belief that change is possible when enough people care enough to try. Every challenge we’ve faced has pushed us to innovate and deepen our mission.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Founded in 2011, CompostNow is a solutions provider for organics recycling with expertise in hauling, logistics, consultation, production, and distribution of compost. Our collection services and network of facilities help thousands of homes, businesses, and municipalities divert and compost over a million pounds of pre-consumer and post-consumer organic waste each month.

B Corp Certified, CompostNow’s work is rooted at the intersection of healthy people and healthy planet, and our mission is to rebuild the health of our soil by diverting waste from landfills and using it to create compost for our communities.

Recently, we’ve hit a major milestone worth SOILbrating: CompostNow members have diverted 100,000,000 pounds of food scraps from landfills since 2011! The most exciting part? It happened one scrap at a time. It’s a powerful reminder that individual actions – no matter how small – really do add up to make a big difference.

What does success mean to you?
We define success by the impact we make – not just in pounds of food waste diverted from landfills, but in the lives and communities we help transform through composting. Success looks like cleaner waste streams, more neighbors inspired to take climate action, healthier soil in local gardens, and the normalization of composting as a default part of daily life.

It also means building a business that is values-aligned, community-supported, and operationally resilient – one that can scale responsibly while staying rooted in service. If we’re helping people feel more connected to the planet and each other through everyday action, we’re doing something right.

Pricing:

• Residential plans start at $29/month
• Commercial plans start at $108/month

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.compostnow.org
• Instagram: @CompostNow
• Facebook: @CompostNow
• LinkedIn: @CompostNow

Image Credits
Bailey Garrot