Compost Crusader Keeps Pedaling

Domingo Medina picked up a green plastic bucket waiting for him on a Mechanic Street front porch, measured its weight, and dumped its wealth of food scraps into one of his four bike-towed containers.

Piled before him was so much more than just a colorful array of eggshells, lemon peels, onion skins, and hunks of bread. In that same pile lay the ingredients for a cleaner environment, healthier soils, and ​“greener” jobs.

“It’s a wonderful sight to see,” Medina said.

Medina is the founder and owner of Peels & Wheels, a pedal-powered community composting business that charges subscribers $7.50 per week to help them divert food waste from the landfill and the incinerator and repurpose it instead as nutrient-rich soil. 

The East Rock resident and Caracas, Venezuela native founded Peels & Wheels back in 2014. Roughly nine years later, his company now has 470 customers — or ​“composters,” as he calls them — across East Rock, Dixwell, Westville, Fair Haven, Fair Haven Heights, Downtown, Prospect Hill, and Spring Glen. 

He now pays five part-time employees to help him cover Peels & Wheels’ nine different bicycle-led pick-up routes all year round. 

Medina and his team bring each week’s haul of food scraps to Phoenix Press Farm on James Street in Fair Haven, where the waste decomposes and is converted into soil that is then returned to Peels & Wheels subscribers or sold or donated to area farms and gardens.

While his business has grown over the years, Medina said, its mission remains the same: To draw attention to the too-often-overlooked detritus of a ​“wasteful society,” to inspire individuals to act now without waiting for governments to lead the way, and to build community support around the environmental and agricultural and economic power of organic mulch.

This is not a ​“cutesy” endeavor, Medina stressed as he biked along a 30-stop pick-up route in East Rock and Downtown Friday. 

“The current state of affairs and the way that we dispose of our waste is generating a lot of issues,” including high incidences of pulmonary cancer and asthma that are only exacerbated by the air pollution caused by burning trash.

Composting, he argued, is a gateway towards reducing society’s waste as a whole. 

“Composting is a biological process, and you can do it right now, whether it be in your house, in your backyard, in your community garden, in a citywide service” like Peels & Wheels, he said. ​“You don’t need to have big legislation. You don’t have to march on Washington. These are things you can do right now. And there are people doing it. And their lifestyles have changed.” 

When you generate waste, Medina continued, you are generating ​“a cost to others. The responsible thing to do is to assume that and to minimize it to increase the quality of life for where we all live. The people who are composting are creating a better place for you.”

Medina, 58, has a master’s degree and a PhD from Michigan State University in natural resource management. He worked for over a decade on rainforest conservation planning in Venezuela before moving to New Haven, where his wife works as a professor at Yale, just under two decades ago.

On Friday morning, I tagged along with Medina for the first hour of what he estimated would be a two-and-a-half-hour, 30-stop biking route across East Rock, Downtown and Dixwell. His day’s ride would culminate with dropping off over 200 pounds of food scraps at the James Street farm. 

Along the way, I got an up-close look — or, at times, a frantically-trying-to-pedal-fast-enough-to-just-barely-keep-up look — at how someone as personally and professionally and idealistically driven as Medina keeps his business going, and keeps spreading the mission of community composting.

"A Wonderful Resource"

The route began at around 10 a.m. in the driveway of a Bishop Street multifamily home. That’s where Medina rents a garage to store the bikes and bins and other tools that power his company’s pick-up service. 

As Peels & Wheels’ only full-time employee, Medina personally rides pick-up routes multiple days a week. He pays his company’s five part-timers $3 per bucket to help cover his business’s nine routes. These are ​“short, intensive, well-paid jobs,” he said. 

He relies entirely on word of mouth to grow his business. If it continues to bring on more composters, he hopes to hire more employees. The goal is to get up to 1,500 to 2,000 customers.

He’s also bracing for the coming sale of the Phoenix Press property. He has partnered with the local food-rescue nonprofit Haven’s Harvest to apply for a grant from the Community Investment Fund 2030 that could help him buy his own property in Fair Haven that, he said, would allow him to triple the capacity of his current composting operation. Haven’s Harvest Executive Director Lori Martin said they submitted the application in January, and hope to hear back in mid-March.

With four plastic containers tied down to a trailer behind his electric-assist bike, Medina pedaled his way across Bishop, up Orange, over to Foster, and ultimately on to Mechanic Street, where the first three stops of the day would be.

On pick-up days, Peels & Wheels subscribers (including this reporter) put their compost buckets — which have capacities that range from 3.5 gallons to 18 gallons — out for Medina or one of his crew members to retrieve. If you forget, you get fined by Medina’s company, as a financial disincentive to wasting his or his employees’ time and as a reminder of just how important it is to follow through on not wasting one’s food scraps.

On Mechanic Street Friday morning, Medina found each green-bodied, black-lidded plastic bin waiting at its pre-arranged pick-up spot.

He lifted each bin over to his bike, weighed it, made a note in a tracker app about the time and heft of that particular pick-up, and then dumped the contents in one of the gray plastic bins towed on the trailer behind his bike.

“That’s pretty clean,” he said as he surveyed the first 6.73 pounds of food scraps of the day. ​“If I see any contaminants, I will take a picture and that will go directly to [the customer’s] email.”

What are the most common types of ​“contaminants” he sees in any given bucket-full of compostables?

“Plastic containers, some utensils, a lot of stickers,” Medina said. Flowers from flower shops also are a big no-no, since they’re often riddled with pesticides. Rubber bands also often mistakenly make it into the mix.

The bins Medina picked up over the course of Friday’s ride weren’t all stationed on houses’ front porches. Some were tucked behind gate or by side doors. Some were on the sidewalks in front of subscriber businesses. Some were stationed behind larger apartment buildings next to dumpsters and recycling bins. 

One was in the cupboards under the sink in the kitchenette of an architectural firm’s second-floor office on Whitney Avenue. Another was up a steep flight of stairs outside of an Audubon Street condo complex. Another was in the utility closet of the Union luxury apartments on Church Street.

While keeping up with the speed of Medina’s cycling required some quick pedaling, staying in step with the rapid-fire flurry of his thoughts proved as formidable of a workout.

Along the ride, Medina expressed frustration about the recent shuttering of the trash-to-power plant in Hartford that has now led to Connecticut sending hundreds of thousands of additional tons of waste every year to incinerators and landfills across the country.

“We are in a state of emergency at a state level,” he said. The state got ​“caught with their pants down. And two things happen when you’re caught with your pants down: You’re embarrassed, and you cannot run fast. Because if you run fast, you might tumble.”

He emphasized his deeply held belief that significant social change can and must start with individuals, and that one must not wait for governments to act first. ​“Always look at the individual. Because I think the decision-making is key. A lot of people don’t agree with that,” but he knows it to be true.

He made his pitch for why composting is a utility that customers should pay for — just as they pay for gas, electricity, Internet, and movie streaming services. ​“When do we start assuming responsibilities for our costs?” he asked. Why should someone feel OK about paying for Netflix but not recycling food waste?

He said he decided to leave New Haven’s Solid Waste & Recycling Authority board when his term ended in December, after finding that the board focused too much on how to maximize tipping fees and not enough on how to fundamentally shift how the city handles, disposes of, and recycles its waste.

And he described how composting can help further the the broader goals of mitigating environmental pollution, enhancing soils for gardens and trees and parks, and creating good-paying and reliable ​“green economy” jobs: ​“We become more of an ecosystem. We play a role in enriching and enhancing and regenerating our place, instead of just being takers and polluters and degraders and exploiters. For me, it’s a philosophical issue.”

Time and again, he returned to the idea that food waste can and should be viewed as a resource — for more mindful and environmentally sustainable living, for a richer economy and a healthier planet.

“This is a wonderful resource,” he said, looking down at the growing food-scrap pile before him. ​“People might say, ​‘No, this is waste. This is trash. This is something to throw away.’ I see a resource.”

At the James Street farm, he said, when he looks at a week’s worth of gathered food scraps ready to be composted and recycled and reused as soil, the sun often hits the pile of organic waste in such a way that a kaleidoscopic array of colors comes streaming out. 

“Actually,” he said, ​“it’s beautiful.”