From garage dream to a Leeds composting A-team

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Cast your minds back to 2016.

The Rio Olympics is on everyone’s lips, the first solar-powered, around-the-world flight touches down – and, in a garage in West Yorkshire, Plate 2 Plate Compost is born!

But, why am I writting a blog that gives a brief history of a micro food waste and composting business in Leeds? Well, I recently realised that Plate 2 Plate Compost will be 9 years old this October and that thought was quickly followed by 'we'll be 10 years old next year'!? This made me think. 'Wow! We've actually come a long way since October 2016'! So I've put my reflections down in this blog. Partially because it's good to look at distance travelled when you're a small business owner and partly to share my experience with other small business owners who are/have been in the same boat. It just helps to know you're not the only person battling away.

In truth though, I'm not 100% sure why I actually started Plate 2 Plate Compost! I was a Sustainability Manager at the time, earning a decent wage, working for one of the largest universities in the country (Leeds Beckett University), great holidays, good pension, managing a small dedicated team and basically living a good life. But one question kept coming up from staff and students:

'Why don't Leeds City Council collect waste food?'

Well, I had good contacts at the council, so I asked them. The answer was the recycling and energy recovery facility at Cross Green Industrial estate. This is where all of the waste, including waste food, from homes in Leeds is incinerated, the waste heat is captured and used to provide heat to homes and business across Leeds through a state of the art district heating scheme.

This is a good thing, great in fact, but......

We can't be buring nutrients! Once you do that, they are removed from the nutrient cycle forever! If you do that across the board, then we will be reliant on manmade fertilizers forever, and whilst they provide nutrients for plants, they aren't that great for soil structure or the soil ecosystem.

It was clear that the abundance of nutrients stored in food waste needs to be diverted from incineration, captured and put back into the soil. To....erm, well, grow more food. Hence Plate 2 Plate Compost. Simple!

So, in October 2016 I decided to set up Leeds' first home and business food waste collection service. I started by collecting food waste from neighbours on my street and processed that food waste using a Ridan In-vessel composter in my garage. Maturing the output from that in a homemade maturation box in one of my flower beds! Complete with a blue plastic sandpit as a lid. The idea was to collect waste food for free and then sell the compost. That would surely bring in enough money to make it financially sustainable right?

In October 2017, almost a year to the day since I stated Plate 2 Plate Compost in my garage, I moved to a small plot of woodland at West Leeds Activity Centre. A great place. I truly loved working there under 3 big cherry trees and out of a storage container. The staff were also great, Richard in particular was always on hand to help me out. However, along with the new site came real business costs. Rent, machinery, etc. Generating more money was rising up the agenda.

Our site at West Leeds Activity Centre. Very basic with lots of physical work.

March 2018 - domestic customers are increasing and our very first business customer, Lidgett Lane Larder, signed up. We had composted 5.8 tonnes of waste food, 985 kgs of coffee grounds and 1.97 tonnes of woodchip. 8.8 tonnes in total.

And the amount of compost........2.6 tonnes! That's right. Waste food is mainly water, at least two thirds of it evaporates! Definately not enough to pay the mortgage or feed the family!

So in 2018 I decided to change the business model and charge for the domestic collections. I was really nervous about this, and strangely, I felt guilty about it. But my wife pointed out that working your arse off (I was still working at Leeds Beckett full-time), providing a service and not to being paid for it was actually self-imposed slavery! So I bit the bullet.

And this is when the magic happened!

Almost all of my domestic food waste customers signed up! Cue uplifting music and everyone standing up from their chairs with purpose!

Thank God! People clearly wanted the service.

August 2019. The support from all my customers meant I could employ a helping hand. Enter Haydon! Introduced to me by Slate Leeds. What a guy. Hard working and loyal and he always wears a smile. He also lives with learning difficulties, so I'm especially pleased to be able to employ him and for him to be a key part of our success.

Haydon and my customers have always been my motivation. Having an employee suddenly put a different emphasis on things. If I'd failed pre-2019 by myself, then that was fine (kind of), I'd just move on. But, if I failed as an employer, other people's lives would be affected, and suddenly failure was not an option. It's a strange feeling when that trueism hits you. It was something my Dad had always said, but like being a parent, you don't fully understand what being an employer means until you are one!

My customers also relied on me, and in return they are always the ones that keep me going. They are always the ones to to say 'keep going, we love what you do'! Usually through a note attached to one of the buckets.

This helped me keep my focus (and sanity). Especially, when a global pandemic hit!

March 2020. Covid!

I was still working at Leeds Beckett, but I'd moved to part-time hours. Monday to Thursday Leeds Beckett with Fridays dedicated to Plate 2 Plate Compost domestic and commercial waste food collections. This was a truely awful time for lots of people, and I think if I'd not had Plate 2 Plate Compost I definately would have imploded. Binmen became frontline staff. So, I was out collecting when others had to stay in and I was processing waste food, in the fresh air, under those beutiful shady cherry trees by myself, in the sun!

Looking back, I've noticed that October seems to be a key month for me. I'm not sure why. Change in the season perhaps? In October 2020, I published our Sustainability Policy. Making an overall commitment to find the balance between social, economic and environmental impacts of the business. With key commitments to employing people with learning difficulties and improving soil health over other options such as biogasification (which is hugely profitable by-the-way). I think Covid made me reflect on what I was doing, focused my mind, and I think this is when Plate 2 Plate Compost became a calling for me.

But Covid came and went and the world started to go back to normal (if you exclude the financial crisis, Brexit, and global conflicts that quickly followed and are still happening!)

And in, yes you've guesed it, October 2022 I bought our first commercial vehicle. I can't tell you what a differrence this made to the business. Waste food collections became infinately more efficient and it symbolised that Plate 2 Plate Compost was a legitamate waste management business. It also prompted a long overdue rebrand. I commisioned a designer in India to do this, and whilst a lot of things were lost in translation (very frustrating), I think the end result is great. The van graphics really stand out from other vans, who tend to keep their designs within the pre-determind panels of the van. Making them very rectangular.

Employing the services of someone from another culture is a great way of standing out without trying to stand out.

'The only constant is change'.

In December 2023 I went full-time with Plate 2 Plate Compost and, unfortuantley, we outgrew the site at West Leeds Activity Centre.

So, in June 2024 (just for a change) we moved to the old piggery at Swillington Organic Farm. The old pig bays are ideal for composting waste food. They have insulated floors and the block work retains the heat so the waste food breaks down really quickly. We are now processing 2 tonnes of waste food, coffee grounds, bread and woodchip a week with a target to process 15 tonnes per week.

The site needs a lot of work before we can process that much. We're starting at the top of the site and working down. No one tells you that when you start a business like this that you'll become a bricklayer, sparky and carpenter, as well as a binman!

To compost waste food at this scale requires machinery. I understand the desire to do business at a human scale. But the fact of the matter is, we are destroying the planet on an industrial scale. So it needs to be repaired on an industrial scale. So in June 2024 I bought our next commercial vehicle. A 30 year old S70 Bobcat skidsteer. I love this machine, and again it has driven efficiency, no more turning tonnes and tonnes of compost by hand! Althought, the waistline is expanding now as a result!!

In May 2025 I bought the largest sieve you'll ever see. It used to take 3 hours at best to sieve one builders bag (600L) of compost. At worst, it would take all day! I now sieve 3 builders bags in a little over 2 hours.

I was once told that a business cannot exist unless the community it's in lets it.

This is true, and to make the point I'm going to end this blog with a big 'Thank You' to all my domestic and commercial customers, who not only signed up to our waste food collection service, but also bought our compost and have helped promote Plate 2 Plate Compost on the way. This includes the Oakwood and Headingley Farmers Markets (where I first sold our compost back in the day), Kirkstall Valley Farm and Meanwood Valley Urban Farm, who use our compost to grow their veg and are both great Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes and more recently The Hepworth. An Art Gallery in Wakefield where I contributed to an actual art installation to celebrate the life and work of an artist called Helen Chadwick. I never thought that would happen!

The business continues to grow. Over the last 9 years we've had over 200 domestic customers and we now have 23 commercial customers. We have a Saturday lad called Finn, who works on a Tuesday, washing the van and Shawn recently joined the team as a driver collecting the buckets on a Thursday.

If you would like to join our ever growing community of homes and businesses that want to:

• capture nutrients from waste food,

• support CSA farming in Leeds and

• minimise their environmental impacts

then sign up to one of our services here.

Thanks for reading

Mark

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