Hannah Wallace

How San Francisco Cracked the Urban Composting Code

California’s environmental achievements are something to behold. The state ranks first in the U.S. for growth in solar power generation and battery storage. It’s the national leader in cumulative electric vehicle sales and public EV charging stations. And it’s one of a growing number of states that aim to run entirely on carbon-free energy in the coming decades – a goal it briefly met, for about 15 minutes, on April 30.

Now, California is once again setting the pace on a critically important (if somewhat less glamorous) climate imperative: urban composting.

On January 1, a law went into effect making it mandatory for every city and county in California to provide residents a means to separate and recycle their organic waste. The impacts could be enormous – according to climate experts, composting is one of the simplest low-tech measures humans can take to reverse climate change. Allowing food waste to decompose in landfills creates methane, a greenhouse gas dozens of times more potent than carbon dioxide. And landfills are the third-largest source of methane in the U.S. Composting has other benefits as well, from sequestering carbon and helping farmers create drought-resistant crops to creating long-term revenue streams for city governments.  

Yet few big American cities have successful city-wide composting programs, particularly on the East Coast. How does a city fully integrate composting into its sanitation stream? Perhaps nowhere offers as clear a path forward as San Francisco, the first big U.S. city to offer composting to all of its residents. Twenty-six years later, its system remains the gold standard.

Building a system scrap by scrap

In 1990, when curbside recycling was still new to many communities, San Francisco was already recycling over 25 percent of its trash. Nevertheless, the city’s Department of the Environment was concerned about all the garbage still being sent to faraway landfills, so it authorized a “waste characterization” study in 1996 in which engineers looked at exactly what was being sent to the dump. What they found was shocking: 33 percent of it was organic material that could have been composted.

“It was a combination of food scraps, sticks and leaves,” says Robert Reed, public relations manager at Recology, a resource recovery company that partners with the city. “We have 5,000 restaurants here, so we’re generating a lot of food scraps.”

All those scraps add up to a heap of emissions, plus the associated costs of disposal. “When you put materials in a landfill, you eventually fill that landfill and you have to build another landfill. And now you have to ship to greater distances,” says Reed.

So, at the city’s request, Recology, which has collected San Francisco’s refuse since 1921, launched a compost pilot program. It started at the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market and on residential routes in the Richmond District. Soon after, it expanded to include some large convention hotels. By 2000, it had gone citywide. 

Nine years later, when cities like Seattle were just beginning their voluntary residential composting programs, San Francisco made composting and recycling mandatory for all residents and businesses. 

Mandatory participation scaled things up dramatically. Recology began offering free composting pails, bin labels, signs, multilingual trainings and toolkits for commercial buildings. It also meant occasional fines from the city for non-compliance. All of it was part of the city’s ambitious plan to be “Zero Waste” by 2020.

Today, San Francisco’s pioneering program is world renowned. Over 135 countries have sent delegations to study the city’s compost and recycling systems first hand. The city collects more than 500 tons of compostable materials from its ubiquitous green bins every day, according to Reed, helping to divert some 80 percent of the city’s waste from landfills. All these organic scraps are turned into high-quality compost in just 60 days at a Blossom Valley Organics facility east of the city, and then sold to local farms, vineyards and orchards.

The curbside composting and recycling bins used in San Francisco. Credit: Recology

The revenue from these sales helps offset the cost of the program. “If something goes into the landfill, there’s no sale!” laughs Reed. The system also creates jobs. According to a study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, composting sustains four times the number of jobs as landfill or incineration disposal operations. In Maryland, a 2013 study found that composting operations provided more total jobs than the state’s three trash incinerators combined. 

And of course, all that compost enriches the region’s soil with nutrients, minerals and microbes, helping farmers grow healthy crops with fewer commercial fertilizers. Compost also acts as a natural sponge – Pennsylvania’s Rodale Institute found that farms can grow up to 40 percent more food in times of drought when they use compost and follow other organic practices. In the West, where drought is common, this is a boon to both commercial farmers and backyard gardeners. Compost can even mitigate the threat of wildfire by retaining moisture from rain and irrigation. 

All of which begs the question: With the many obvious benefits and few apparent downsides, why, 26 years after San Francisco started composting, haven’t other major cities like New York, Boston, or Chicago followed suit?

New York’s composting conundrum

Not long ago, New York City briefly had its own in-home composting program. In 2015, then New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced a Zero Waste initiative similar to San Francisco’s. Composting was its cornerstone. Pandemic-related budget cuts forced the city to suspend the service in May 2020. But even before that, the program was anemic, only diverting 43,000 tons of food scraps in 2017 – just five percent of the city’s total food waste. 

A New York City curbside composting bin in 2017 before the program was discontinued. Credit: Wikipedia

Theories abound as to what went wrong. One big one has to do with a lack of public outreach. Even the chairman of the city council’s sanitation committee admitted that no one in his own building knew how the system worked. “In my building, we received the brown bins, and some fliers,” he told the New York Times. “I guarantee I’m the only person in my building who knows how to use them.” 

Simply convincing residents to change their long-standing garbage habits was another hurdle. Former NYC Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia told the Times, “The biggest challenge is asking New Yorkers to do something different.” She related a story about how, when the department was handing out brown bins one man didn’t want one. “But we were handing out compost at the same time, and he definitely wanted the compost. We said, ‘We really need your banana peels in order to make this in the future.’” The man took one of the bins, illustrating the importance of education and outreach.

New York re-launched its composting program in August 2021 in neighborhoods where interest was most concentrated, according to Vincent Gragnani, press secretary at the city’s Department of Sanitation. Soon, there will be 100 bins at schools across the city that can be accessed with a smartphone app or a key card. “Within the next two years, every public school in the city will be separating their organic waste for collection,” Gragnani told RTBC. New Sanitation Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch is in the process of reviewing what has and has not worked with the city’s program in the past, but is not ready to share this publicly.

Can California strike ‘black gold’?

Now, inspired by San Francisco’s trailblazing composting success, California is set to enact statewide composting for all. (Only a small handful of states mandate statewide composting). The goal of the law is to reduce the landfilling of compostable materials by 75 percent by 2025, thereby reducing methane emissions on a massive scale. CalRecycle, the department that oversees the state’s recycling and waste reduction programs, estimates about half of the state’s communities had food and yard waste collection programs at the start of 2022.

“We all have the same goal: to send as little as possible to the landfill,” says Reed. Credit: Sacramento State

There are several things the remaining cities and counties around California can do to emulate San Francisco’s success. One is to stay on message. In 2000, when Recology made green bins available to every resident in San Francisco, the response was mixed. “Some people said, ‘Come and take it back.’ Other people embraced it right away,” recalls Reed. “We were doing a lot of outreach and education in promoting the program and why we think it’s important for people to participate.” 

For instance, San Franciscans speak over 100 different languages, so Recology opted to put photographs on the green bins (in addition to a few words in English, Spanish, and Chinese), showing what can and can’t be composted. The company also produces a customer newsletter that comes with its bills, filled with articles about the benefits of composting and recycling. In addition, Reed, a former reporter, worked closely with journalists to get stories published early on about restaurants embracing composting and vineyards relying on compost from the city. 

But according to Reed, the key to composting success is getting kids on board. “The best way to get adults to compost is to get composting programs running in schools,” he says. Recology donates compost to school gardens, which makes a big impression on children. “Those kids go home and say, ‘Why don’t we compost at home?’ The very next day the dad has a pail on the kitchen counter, and they’re rolling.” 

Prior to the pandemic, classrooms would visit the Recology Environmental Learning Center and even take tours of the composting and recycling plants. During Covid, Recology’s programming for students has shifted online. The company leads virtual field trips via Zoom and has produced educational videos and games about composting and recycling for kids from pre-K to high school. There’s even a “Better at the Bin” coloring book.

Finally, Reed says regular and frequent communication with the city is key to the composting program’s success. Every week, Recology staff members meet with a team from the Department of the Environment. “We all have the same goal: to send as little as possible to the landfill,” Reed says. At these meetings, they compare the tonnage that the city is sending to compost versus sending to the landfill, brainstorm ways of getting more residents to compost, and discuss messaging. 

One conundrum recently tackled in these meetings was how to encourage more participation in apartment buildings, which have lower rates of composting and recycling, and where 65 percent of San Franciscans live. Their solution: recruit volunteers at these buildings to distribute Recology’s monthly newsletter, as well as encourage composting in neighborly ways, like with composting contests or quizzes. “These are very creative people!” says Reed. “They keep composting part of the conversation.” There are now advocates in 100 buildings around the city.  

One of these is Madeleine Trembley, who lives at the Gateway Complex in the city’s Financial District. A year ago, Trembley, who refers to compost reverently as black gold, started a newsletter for her 1,255-unit building called Trash Talk. “The newsletter immediately got a lot of peoples’ attention,” Trembley says. “It was educational, practical. We give tips that people can implement easily, understand easily.” As a result of her newsletter and the topics it covered, more young residents have gotten involved in the Board — and one of them is even making video tutorials about composting to share with residents. “It just makes no sense to create more methane gas to stow it away in the landfill. And I think a lot of people realize that.” 

 

Household Recycling Made Easier — For a Price

I wrote about Ridwell, the Seattle startup that's building a business around collecting all the old batteries, clamshell containers and lightbulbs that most recycling programs leave behind, for Bloomberg Businessweek.   

 

Jill Fransen considers herself a serious recycler, the kind of person who knows the difference between various plastics, takes care to sort them, and drives five miles from her home in Portland, Oregon’s, North Tabor neighborhood to drop off refuse at a recycling center.

Over nearly a dozen years, Fransen’s routine was pretty well established. Then in late 2020, she heard about Ridwell, a subscription-based recycling service that had just been introduced in Portland. For about $12 per month, Ridwell would pick up items — stuff that many recycling programs won’t accept, like certain plastics and spent lightbulbs — right from one’s front porch, and take everything to its local plant to sort and redistribute for recycling or re-use.

“I was skeptical at first because of the monthly charge,” says Fransen. But seeing Styrofoam and #1 PET plastics — for polyethylene terephthalate, most known as the plastic used to make clamshell and other food containers — on Ridwell’s collection list persuaded Fransen to give it a try. “You have no idea how much #1 PET plastic you use,” she says. (According to the Michigan-based consulting firm Resource Recycling Systems, just 9% of the 1.5 billion pounds of PET-made items circulating in the U.S. are recycled.) “And driving out to East Portland got to be a pain in the neck.”

Taylor Loewen, general manager of Ridwell’s Portland operations, sits atop plastic bales at the warehouse.

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

Fransen is among the nearly 300 early adopters of the service in Portland, where operations started in November 2020. Since then, the number of subscribers there has grown to 22,400. Ridwell launched and established itself first in Seattle before expanding to Portland, Bellingham, Washington, Denver, Minneapolis and Austin. The total subscribers collectively is about 60,000. The company is among a small group of environmental startups that are working to eliminate plastic packaging and create compostable plastics from mycelium, a mushroom root.

Ridwell’s growth has coincided with Americans’ redirecting much of their anxiety and restlessness over the pandemic into online shopping. That in turn has generated huge amounts of garbage. “So many people were getting stuff delivered from Amazon, Instacart, and takeout,” says Taylor Loewen, Ridwell’s Portland general manager. “People were stuck at home realizing: ‘There’s just so much packaging in my house!’”

The effort started well before the Covid pandemic. Generally, consumers don’t have many easy options for properly disposing of things like plastic film, batteries, lightbulbs, and clamshell containers. In January 2018, China banned the import of most plastic recyclables, leaving many U.S. cities without a place to send what they’d collected. Before then, processors in China had handled about half of the world’s recyclable waste. Greenpeace has estimated that more than 90% of the plastic ever produced has not been recycled. 

Ridwell founder and CEO Ryan Metzger at the company’s Seattle warehouse.

Photographer: Chona Kasinger/Bloomberg

Those types of items had accumulated in Ridwell founder Ryan Metzger’s basement in his Seattle home. One weekend in the fall of 2017, he and his then 6-year-old son Owen started to clear the house of the refuse. “Every weekend, Owen and I would pick a category — Styrofoam, batteries, lightbulbs — and we would find a local partner,” he explained — someplace willing to take the haul. Before long, Metzger, then a marketing consultant for startups, was also hauling neighbors’ expired batteries and lightbulbs to various drop-off centers and recycling facilities around Seattle, along with his own trash. He’d post messages to the  neighborhood message board Buy Nothing, sharing tips about how to get rid of stuff — “I found a place that takes Styrofoam!”

The project, initially dubbed “Owen’s List,” caught on quickly. By October 2018, with 99 customers, it was officially named Ridwell. Within a year, the subscriber list had grown to 2,400 in the greater Seattle area.

For a monthly fee of $12 to $16, depending on the length of commitment, a square white Ridwell box is collected every two weeks. The box comes with reusable cloth bags, one for each item category — batteries, lightbulbs, threads, plastic, and a rotating “featured category” which ranges from old printer cartridges to holiday lights. Metzger estimates that, as of February, over 4.6 million pounds of waste from just Seattle, Portland, and Denver have been diverted from landfills.

Finding local partners, a key piece in the project from the beginning, has helped the expansion. Metzger worked to connect with businesses and other organizations that might re-use or recycle some of the collected items. Today, Loewen, the Portland general manager, and other employees with similar roles in Ridwell’s various locations spend a good chunk of time connecting with nonprofits and organizations like Free Geek, a Portland area technology nonprofit that facilitates the reuse of small electronics. The partners and categories vary from city to city.

Ridwell offers Portlanders a way to recycle plastic film, batteries, lightbulbs, and plastic clamshell containers.

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

Four years in, the venture also has become a fuller recycling business in its own right. At Ridwell’s 10,000 square foot warehouse in northeast Portland, employees sort plastic bags and blue Amazon wrappers (recyclable) from manila padded envelopes (not recyclable). A baler is used to compress plastic film into compact bundles. Industrial-sized bins spill over with second-hand clothes which ultimately will be donated to the city’s Pioneer Wiping Cloth, one of several organizations Ridwell works with.

Ridwell’s work has drawn investor interest. Metzger says the company has received three rounds of funding, though he won’t disclose the amounts. The business, he adds, is largely customer-supported.

Dylan de Thomas is vice president for external affairs at The Recycling Partnership, a national nonprofit dedicated to improving recycling systems across the country. De Thomas, who is based in Portland, is a fan of Ridwell — with one caveat. “I think it’s a neat concept. For all the materials — minus one — it’s a convenience service,” he says, referring to PET thermoforms, which are not only not accepted by the city’s recycling program but aren’t taken by any of the free recycling centers in town, either.

An unanticipated development has been a clash with Portland trash haulers, particularly in Clackamas and Washington counties. There, the sanitation workers have protested that Ridwell is stepping on their toes, even though those municipalities don’t currently accept the items that Ridwell collects. (Portland doesn’t have a municipal sanitation department, so private companies are contracted to collect garbage.) Another big challenge has been logistics. “It’s a logistics business that is growing quickly,” Metzger says.

Employees collect and sort items from Ridwell members at the Ridwell warehouse in Portland, Oregon

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

The Recycling Partnership’s de Thomas says ideally, what Ridwell collects and helps to redistribute or recycle should be part of any municipal service. “I prefer recycling programs that serve all of the residents equally and equitably,” he says.

Metzger is working to address the imbalance, he says, and is aware that the service Ridwell offers is not something everybody can afford. To that end, the company launched a pilot project over the December holiday season: for every gift card sold, Ridwell contributed $10 towards a six-month community-supported membership, of which there are now 100. “We hope to make it a more regular and larger part of Ridwell,” Metzger says.

Education also is part of Metzger’s game plan. The company sends out regular emails explaining what items are and are not included in each category. For example, a link might take you to the Clamshells page , which specifies that #1 PET plastic includes everything from plastic egg cartons and deli containers to plastic cookie trays. Not included in the category? Plastic bottles, blister packaging for batteries or electronics and colored plastics. Photos on each page make it easy to determine what is and isn’t included.

Last October, Metzger launched a transparency page. The company already had been sharing the names of their local partners, but on the transparency page, they also post each category’s contamination rates (how much collected material can’t be recycled or reused because it’s too dirty). On the website, you’ll learn that plastic film is the company’s most popular category in all six cities and goes to Trex in Nevada, where it’s transformed into composite decking.  Also that batteries, which go to EcoLights, have the highest recycling rate: 100%. 

“Transparency is something that consumers are very interested in,” Metzger says.  “It reinforces the behavior they’re making and shows the impact that we can all have by recycling and reusing properly.”

California’s Floodplains Are Coming Back, and So Are Their Salmon

Farmers and ecologists are partnering to restore the state’s natural flooding patterns, allowing native fish to thrive.

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Until just a couple of centuries ago, inland California was a lush tapestry of wetlands and floodplains that nourished a thriving ecosystem of fish. But as the state — and its vast agriculture industry — has grown, its waterways have been modified drastically. Rivers have been drained, fields dried out, levees and dams constructed. These engineering feats, coupled with extreme drought, have decimated natural habitats. Today, a shocking 83 percent of native fish species in the state are in decline.

Chinook salmon is one of these. “Winter runs used to have returns in the hundreds of thousands. Now a good year would be 10,000 fish,” says Andrew L. Rypel, a professor of fish ecology at UC Davis where he co-directs the Center for Watershed Sciences. Today, two of California’s three recognized Chinook salmon runs are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. “We have had years that have just been in the hundreds. It’s a species on the precipice of extinction.”

Now, Rypel and his colleagues are helping the Chinook rebound by working with California rice farmers to recreate the natural floodplains in which the fish used to thrive.

“One of the critical parameters that salmon managers are interested in is out-migration survival. Do they make it to the ocean? And how many?” Credit: Center for Watershed Sciences

The so-called “salmon-rice project” began a decade ago, when a motley group of scientists, rice farmers and conservationists joined together to answer a simple question: if they were to flood rice fields with water from the Sacramento River — effectively mimicking the region’s original ecological rhythms — would juvenile salmon take to the fields and grow? 

First, they conducted some basic experiments to see whether salmon even lived in floodplains. Turns out, they did. The Nigiri Project – which began in the early 2000s, is still ongoing and involves some of the same people working on Rypel’s project — set out to determine whether salmon can survive on rice fields. In Asian countries, freshwater fish are often raised on flooded rice paddies, but it wasn’t known if salmon in particular were suited to that environment.

“The answer was that they not only survive, they grow extremely well,” Rypel says. “The fish were feeding on lush zooplankton that develop off the decomposed rice straws.” Rice straw is a rich source of carbon, and Rypel says that the density of zooplankton (normally microscopic) that develops in these winter-flooded rice plains is so high that you can actually see them with the naked eye, swimming around. 

“It turns out that this kind of food is like an awesome steak for the growing salmon,” he says. UC Davis scientists found that these juvenile salmon survived at high rates in the flooded rice fields — 50 to 80 percent over the course of a month. “That’s excellent for baby fish,” Rypel says. They also grew two to five times faster than they grow in the Sacramento River.

With these data points in hand, Rypel and his colleagues teamed up with the California Rice Commission and California Trout in 2018 and began studying the viability of raising juvenile salmon in small experimental fields. The work was funded, in part, by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a wing of the United States Department of Agriculture that pays farmers and ranchers to do conservation work. 

The researchers found that juvenile salmon grew two to five times faster on the rice fields than they grow in the Sacramento River. Credit: Center for Watershed Sciences

In 2021 the California Rice Commission and the UC Davis scientists got an additional $550,000 grant from NRCS to continue and expand upon their work. (The California Rice Commission and its partners are matching this grant.) Though this is the first year scientists are trying this out on production-scale rice farms, preliminary data is encouraging. For instance, in years like the past one, when the rice fields around the Sacramento River don’t flood naturally, farmers flood their fields with water from the adjacent canals and then scientists stock them with hatchery fish. They then track the fishes’ growth, survival and movements. Data so far indicates that these fish survive at a rate four to five times higher than lab-raised fish. 

In the coming months, they’ll continue to track these hatchery salmon with tiny acoustic transmitters as they make their way out to sea. “One of the critical parameters that salmon managers are interested in is out-migration survival,” Rypel says. “That is: do they make it to the ocean? And how many?” The plan is to track 600 of the salmon to see if they make it to the Golden Gate Bridge and conduct a side-by-side comparison with lab-reared fish of out-migration survival.

 

Rypel says it boils down to two words: Big and early. “Being a baby salmon kind of sucks!” he laughs. “It’s really hard. Most of the fish die. You are dodging predators, you have to migrate a super-long distance. You need fat reserves.” Giving the salmon a head start while they’re still very young can have huge knock-on effects. “We think that by rearing them on these rice fields, we can get fish very big, very quick. If the fish can become smolts [juvenile salmon] earlier in the winter, they can ride the flows better and have better survivorship.”

Raising fish in rice paddies is nothing new. Rice farmers from China, Thailand, India and Northern Vietnam have been doing it for centuries – according to some evidence, for as long as 2,000 years. 

According to Rypel, the unusual collaboration between farmers and ecologists is “a good example of how farms can work together with conservation scientists to make a difference.” Credit: Center for Watershed Science

But the project in California is actually more directly inspired by a series of bird conservation efforts dating back to the late 1980s and early ’90s. At the time, Pacific flyway birds — ducks, snow geese, egrets and all the other migratory birds that over-summer up in Alaska or Canada, and over-winter in the Central Valley — were in decline. For decades, rice farmers in the area regularly burned their leftover rice straw after the fall harvest. “People who lived in the area at that time will remember when the skies were black with smoke,” Rypel says. The air quality was poor, and carbon was being released into the atmosphere, as well.

Residents frustrated by poor air quality campaigned to stop this practice, and in 1991 a state law banned it. “Some smart people got together at that time and figured out that if you re-flooded the rice fields, you could naturally decompose the rice straw,” Rypel says. “At the same time, you could potentially provide habitat for the migratory birds that were on the Pacific flyway.” The NRCS began a program where they paid rice farmers to flood their fields instead of burn them, which was a win for the locals, a win for the birds and a win for the farmers, as it gave them a new revenue stream.

“I’m not a bird ecologist, but I work with a lot of bird scientists who have worked on this, and it’s probably one of the big conservation success stories in our country’s history,” Rypel says.

It was that program’s success that got fish ecologists scratching their heads. “Hey, if you can do this for birds, why can’t you do that for fish?” Rypel recounts. “We’ve got 83 percent of species declining in California. We know salmon use the floodplains. Is there a way to do this with fish?” 

The answer appears to be a resounding yes. There are roughly 500,000 acres of rice under cultivation in the Sacramento Valley. “That’s a lot of habitat that’s potentially on the table there,” notes Rypel. He and his colleagues at UC Davis hope to replicate the model on more farms in years to come. “It’s a good example of how farms can work together with conservation scientists to make a difference.”

The Nike Designers who Started an Online Cremation Service

I wrote about Solace, a Portland-based startup, for Bloomberg Businessweek. 

David Odusanya (L) and Keith Crawford (R) at the Solace offices in Portland, Oregon 

When Keith Crawford and David Odusanya started their cremation company in April 2019, there was no way they could anticipate that a worldwide pandemic would soon prove the urgency of their model.

As Covid-19 approaches the two-year mark, Solace Cremation has turned out to be a service for the modern age—a web-based business that offers a safe and remote experience while allowing customers to smoothly organize a loved one’s cremation. Based in Portland, Ore., with operations in Seattle and Southern California, Solace handles the entire process almost completely online.

Crawford and Odusanya, formerly brand designers at Nike, left the apparel giant in 2017 to form their own creative agency, Co-Lab.  A couple years later, after reflecting on the difficulties they both experienced upon losing a parent, they started to research the funeral business. 

Crawford’s father died in 2013 after a battle with Parkinson’s disease, but he’d planned everything about his own funeral and paid for all of it in advance. Even so, the funeral director overseeing the arrangements tried to up-sell Crawford and his siblings on various products and services once their father was gone. “Why would we want to do anything different from what my dad had chosen?” Crawford asks. And why, he kept wondering, hadn’t anyone come up with a better experience, given how many Americans are dissatisfied with end-of-life rituals.

Odusanya’s mother passed away later that same year, in his hometown of Sheffield, England. Her wish was to be cremated.  “I couldn’t understand why we were paying $2,000 for a wooden casket,” he says.

They each came away from those experiences wondering how they might fully redesign the funeral home experience — “so creepy and gloomy,” says Crawford. Part of their research involved interviewing families who’d had reactions similar to Crawford’s. The process, they heard again and again, was antiquated and cold, leaving most people feeling it was all about money. The pair was also surprised to learn that the cremation rate surpasses the burial rate in this country and no one’s building new funeral homes. So they ditched their initial idea and focused on modernizing the experience of saying goodbye to a loved one.

The death-care industry is dominated by Service Corporation International, a conglomerate that owns mortuary chains such as Dignity Memorial, Neptune Society, and Funeraria Del Angel. The industry is notoriously opaque about pricing. Even in California, where funeral homes must list prices online, a loophole allows many to get out of that basic requirement. Most funeral homes won’t disclose rates until you’re sitting at a table with them with a big binder plopped down in front of you.

“If you’ve chosen direct cremation there is no need for all the funeral home visits, paperwork by hand, and in-person meetings,” Crawford says. “We removed that from the equation and—COVID aside—people are very happy about that. It gives them time to do other things—plan a memorial, grieve with their families.”

Funeral rates rise with various purchases: caskets, floral arrangements, even prayer cards. And the cost of cremation increases significantly when handled by a traditional funeral home—to an average of $2,550 in the U.S., according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Even when choosing cremation at a typical funeral home, the fees can pile up, says Malisa Riceci, Solace’s funeral director. “If you want ‘priority’ cremation, if you want a lock of hair, if your loved one is over a certain weight, even if you want a pacemaker removed—these all add up very quickly,” she says. Most people, still overcome by grief, wind up agreeing to extra costs because they don’t have the time or emotional energy to shop around or negotiate.

Solace adds no extra fees. Its $895 flat fee includes: picking up the body (of any size), removing a pacemaker, cremating within 48 hours, completing paperwork, and returning a loved one’s ashes in a simple cardboard box. The only extra cost is for the death certificate, as that varies depending on the state and the number of copies a family needs.

The Solace office in Portland, Oregon.   [Courtesy of Solace Cremation] 

 

“What they have done is brilliant and necessary,” says Michael Hebb, founder of Death Over Dinner, a nonprofit that organizes events where people talk about death. He met Crawford and Odusanya about five years ago at Endwell, an annual industry symposium. “For one, the clarity of the offer and the pricing.” he says. “It’s not hidden away in some part of a funeral home’s website.”

Liz Eddy is the 31-year-old founder of Lantern, a resource guide for end-of-life planning that also serves as a digital vault for documents. Eddy singles out the one-on-one care the Solace team takes with each customer—even as it’s done remotely. “You have to deeply connect and earn trust with the individual,” she says. “They allow for ease, but also the experience is warm and connected and run by people who really understand” customers’ needs.

Solace says its growth has been swift. Although it doesn’t disclose figures, it says revenue tripled from 2019 to 2020. The startup recently collaborated with the Good Mod, a Portland design company, and industrial designer Rob Bruce, also a former Nike employee, to create more permanent urns—a frequent customer request—from 3D printed clay. These are available for sale on a separate website for $195 and up.

“We want to provide services that families want,” Odusanya says, “vs. just trying to sell them anything.”

The Anti-Displacement Repair Team of Portland

By fixing up homes in Black neighborhoods, one group is slowing down harmful gentrification and keeping communities intact.

 

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful. My friend Cheryl Juetten took the photos.  

A former professional boxer who has spent 30-plus years training young men how to fight, J.C. Wade wasn’t exactly used to asking for help.

“I’m the proud man guy, you know?” says the resident of Woodlawn in Northeast Portland. “Don’t want to let nobody know I need help.” But now he freely admits that he needed it. 

J.C. Wade in front of his house in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Portland 

Wade, 68, has four types of arthritis and recently went through prostate cancer treatment. The chemotherapy exhausted him and he had to quit his job as a city bus driver. Stuff piled up around his house. But his biggest issue was the kitchen sink. The pipe had clogged, and because the sink was built into the cabinets they’d have to replace the whole thing, which he couldn’t afford. “So for about four years, I had a big pot up under the sink that the water would run in,” he chuckles, “and I would filter the garbage out and pour the water down the toilet.”

Then, in August 2020, Wade got a call from a friend who told him about Taking Ownership PDX, an organization that helps Black homeowners age in place. Taking Ownership PDX is oriented toward longtime residents like Wade, who bought his ranch-style house in Woodlawn in the mid 1980s. Six of his ten kids grew up there. 

The group focuses on maintenance to keep houses livable, making long-needed repairs and renovations to decaying decks, sagging roofs and failing plumbing. In so doing, the organization aims to generate wealth for Black homeowners, deter predatory investors and realtors, and prevent communities from being splintered by gentrification. 

Woodlawn is just one of Northeast Portland’s historically Black neighborhoods that, over the past decade, has seen an influx of younger, wealthier and mostly white homeowners. Residents who grew up in Woodlawn now can’t afford to live there; median home prices are $551,000, according to Zillow. Longtime homeowners like Wade are more than just property owners, then. They’re an essential part of the city’s fabric whose presence gives the neighborhood a sense of continuity. 

When he applied for help with Taking Ownership PDX, Wade had no idea what to expect. “I wasn’t used to people helping me,” he says. Then a team of eight showed up at his house. They dismantled a rotting shed, fixed up the yard, cleaned the basement and repaired that sink — without even needing to replace the whole thing.   

“They helped for days!” Wade says, astonished. “My yard was overgrown — I had dumpsters worth of overgrowth. But they cut it, cleaned it. I haven’t really seen my yard in years. It looked like a jungle. And they kept coming back, you know? It relieved a lot of pressure off of me. I get a little teary-eyed thinking about it. Let me get my man-up stuff!”

 

Wade’s house was one of Taking Ownership’s first projects. Since then, the group, founded by 36-year-old Randal Wyatt in July 2020, has helped over 50 Black homeowners across Portland. The organization has raised over half a million dollars and maintains a database of 250 local volunteers who are eager to pitch in on the projects whenever they arise. 

Wyatt, a native Portlander, has always been a helper. Before Taking Ownership, he was a student advocate at Portland YouthBuilders, worked with teenagers at the Latino Network, and served as a residential treatment counselor at the Salvation Army. When he had twin boys at 19, he learned the importance of strong communities.

“Becoming a father so young, I realized real quickly that life is much bigger than me,” Wyatt says. “We live in a capitalist society where we think very individualistically. I thought, ‘I have to contribute to the community.’ I care about other people.” For the past 16 years, he has used hip-hop to address social issues, reaching teens with rhythm and poetry workshops, and holds benefit concerts for various causes. After the murder of George Floyd, friends and neighbors reached out to see how they could be stronger allies to Portland’s Black community.

Since he was 11, Wyatt has lived in Northeast Portland and watched it gentrify. “I know that white supremacy is based on land ownership. So I just thought, if we pool our money together and come together as a community and fix up Black-owned homes, we might be able to alleviate the financial burden, bridge the wealth gap, raise property values and help people stay in their homes.”

When he launched Taking Ownership he posted about it on Instagram. Donations started pouring in. After the first two projects, word spread quickly. “It blew up almost overnight,” he says. After that, Black homeowners interested in getting help filled out referral forms on the Taking Ownership website. Then they’d go onto the waitlist. Wyatt says senior citizens, people on a fixed income and single parents get priority.

“We prioritize people who make $20,000 or less a year. We’re very clear about that,” he says. There are currently 120 people on the waitlist.

Wyatt has partnered with other organizations and companies that donate appliances and services so that people waiting can get things they desperately need like new water heaters or air conditioners. After June’s record-breaking heat waves, Taking Ownership sponsored an AC and fan drive and collected nearly 200 fans and air conditioning units in a single day. For some Black Portlanders, like J.C. Wade, it was the first time they had ever had AC. “It was just a small air conditioner and it’s in one room, but it was enough for me and my dogs to make it,” he says.

The new stove installed by Taking Ownership PDX volunteers in J.C. Wade’s kitchen. Credit: Cheryl Juetten

In addition to the hundreds of volunteers who do yard work, sorting, cleaning and other tough, non-skilled labor, Wyatt works with four licensed contractors who handle structural projects like decks, windows and roofs. He also works with two Black-owned landscaping companies, an electrician and a plumbing company, and has, on several occasions, partnered with a Latino-owned roofing company and a green design/build firm called Birdsmouth. All the contractors are paid, unless, like Birdsmouth, they donate some of their labor.

One of his contractors is James Mwas Njoroge of Jenga Construction LLC. Njoroge, who moved to Portland from Kenya in 2005, has been a contractor for 10 years and recently launched his own company. He’d been following Wyatt on social media when he read about Taking Ownership. “What he is doing is very very important, and not just for the homeowners,” Njoroge says. “He’s trying to get Black people more opportunities to work.” There aren’t many licensed Black contractors in the Portland area, but Njoroge is hoping that will change. Over the next year, he aims to help Wyatt reach out to Black youth and encourage them to enter the trades.

 Jed Overly was Taking Ownership’s first volunteer before becoming the organization’s volunteer coordinator. A Black man who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, he’d experienced racism up close. “Everything that was going on at that time [after George Floyd’s murder] triggered my internal convictions,” he says. “Taking Ownership gave me an outlet to make things better. I attended a lot of protests. But I’d ask myself, ‘But what are we doing, though?’” Instead of tearing something down, he wanted to build something up. “And that’s literally what Randal was doing.”

Overly says that even now, 16 months after Taking Ownership launched, he still gets 10 to 15 new volunteers a week. About 25 percent are Black, compared to just six percent of the city at large. Volunteers often work alongside homeowners, or homeowners’ children or grandchildren. One of the things Overly loves about the work events is that people make long-lasting connections. “Volunteers are swapping numbers. People are becoming friends,” he says. Some people even become friends with the homeowners. “So you have little old ladies who need help rearranging their house. They get the volunteer’s number. It really is community-building.” 

J.C. Wade in his restored backyard. Credit: Cheryl Juetten

Samantha Guss, who has worked on four projects, says she’s ripped out a lot of blackberry bushes. “I’m pretty sure every project has a blackberry bush,” she says. She’s also dismantled fences, scrubbed floors and helped sort through personal belongings. But all the hard work is worth it, she says, when you see how happy the homeowner is. This volunteer opportunity also came at a time when she really needed community.  “I was deep into depression with the pandemic, very isolated. So it was really great for me to be able to feel useful. To help someone else that needed it. It really helped my mental health.”

One of the negative consequences of gentrification is that when wealthier people move into a neighborhood, they tend to report their less-well-off neighbors for minor code violations like peeling paint or overgrown grass. A recent analysis by the city’s Ombudsman’s Office showed that Portland neighborhoods with the fastest rising home prices and those with the most racially diverse residents tend to have the most property violation reports. This often results in residents facing escalating fines — and eventually liens — putting families at risk of foreclosure. In Portland, this complaint-driven system disproportionately impacts homeowners of color. 

“Becoming a father so young, I realized real quickly that life is much bigger than me. I thought, ‘I have to contribute to the community.’” Credit: Cheryl Juetten

Wyatt hopes to inspire Portlanders to be more compassionate, more community-minded. “As neighborhoods get more affluent, the standard of upkeep changes and maybe some of the homeowners who have owned their homes for 30 years don’t have the same financial abilities as some of their neighbors to maintain their homes,” he says. “I want people to understand: instead of calling the city, why not go over there and meet your neighbor? Why aren’t they able to keep up on their house?  Why not lend a hand?”