PROVO — If the eeriness of the run-down, abandoned building isn't enough to turn the curious away, the smell surely will.
In the dimly lit basement of a long deserted building in east Provo, piles of old fruit and vegetables sit in the darkness between colorful graffiti-covered walls.
The smell of decomposing produce is off-putting. Add to that uncomfortable heat and humidity and the loud, constant grind of a wood chipper, and one wonders why anyone would want to enter this basement, let alone work here for hours a day.
But this old building, which has served numerous purposes in the past, now fertilizes a fast growing local business.
In 2009, after enjoying breakfast at an all-you-can-eat buffet with his brother, young entrepreneur Daniel Blake realized just how much of the food was being thrown away by not only himself but a large number of other customers.
"On the ride home we started talking about ways to monetize on people's food waste," Blake said. "And that was the birth of the idea behind Eco Scraps."
In the early days of Blake's business idea, the BYU English student turned to Dumpster diving in his free time to find food scraps to experiment with. What he found he'd then chop and blend in his kitchen and compost in garbage cans in his apartment complex parking lot.
After a good deal of experimentation with various, all-natural ingredients, a successful formula was developed and an environmentally friendly compost product was born.
"It's a fully organic soil conditioner made out of local produce waste that has nearly double the nutrients of chemical fertilizers, but all the benefits of organic compost," Blake said.
Blake's solo experimentation started in August 2009, and now, almost a year later, Eco Scraps is an award-winning startup consisting of a four-person management team including Blake, Ryan Hansen, Brandon Sargent and Craig Martineau, plus seven other employees.
According to the Eco Scraps website, ecoscraps.net, 30 million tons of food -- that's 25 percent of all food produced -- is thrown away in the United States each year. The team at Eco Scraps has developed an organic process to turn this food waste, which would otherwise rot in a landfill producing great amounts of methane gas, into a high-quality soil conditioner that is quickly growing in popularity among gardeners.
"When I started, I was not an environmentalist, and I was not even aware of most of the social issues that our business is now addressing," said Blake, who is happy that now anyone can make a difference by just contributing to, or by using Eco Scraps' product.
With a growing list of five grocery stores and six coffee shops in Utah Valley now contributing their produce waste and coffee grounds to the Eco Scraps project, the employees stay busy at their temporary production facility. A delivery driver makes rounds each day to pick up the food waste which is then dropped off to be ground into a pulp and mixed with other ingredients. The freshly mixed piles are left to naturally heat up and "cook" over time into compost, being turned over daily and monitored until it is bagged to be sold.
Blake's former roommate, Stephen Hackett, is now an Eco Scraps employee.
"When Dan was living with me he kept talking about how good the business was doing. At first I thought, 'How much success can you really have just mulching up garbage?"' said Hackett, who was at first a skeptic and is now not only an employee but a firm believer in the company's environmental impact.
"It's good that we've found a use for stuff that would otherwise be thrown away," he said.
Hackett's daily work of making the compost is a very messy procedure, especially at this scale.
"Lots of hard work, a lot of smelly clothes, and one pair of ruined shoes," Russell Balli, a summer employee for Eco Scraps, said of the work.
Despite less than pleasant working conditions, Balli, Hackett and other employees continue to go through the grind of recycling 2,000 pounds of local produce waste a day, turning it into 60,000 pounds of product a month which always sells out. A newer and larger workspace may soon be required if the company continues to grow and receive recognition at a fast rate.
Eco Scraps took second place at the BYU Social Venture Competition and is the first Utah team to become a Sparkseed Innovator after competing against other social innovator teams from universities nationwide. Recently the Eco Scraps management team reaped some of the rewards from their growing success and traveled to do market research and meet investors in San Francisco.
"All of the nurseries have been blown away by our product and love it. They say this product is not just organic but is the first 'green' product to hit the gardening market and people are just going to eat it up," said Blake, while visiting California with his management team. "I am always surprised at how much positive feedback we get from everyone."
By the start of 2011, Eco Scraps hopes to open five additional markets in California, Arizona, Colorado and Oregon, and plans on a total of 50 markets opening nationwide in the next three years.
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