Meet Evanston’s ‘cooperative’ green entrepreneur

There are many noteworthy environmental leaders in Evanston, but Erlene Howard may be in a class of her own.

This longtime Evanston resident got the notion to start Collective Resource, a compost collection service, in 2010.

She “picked up the first ton of compost out of the back of her Toyota,” noted General Manager Jeremy Barrows with a laugh. Soon her son joined her, then they got a truck. Fast forward from those humble beginnings: Today they serve 3,000 client addresses (many for sites serving hundreds of people) out of their Skokie industrial park location, covering a 100-square-mile radius in and around Chicago.

Collective Resource moves 40 tons of industrial compost per week; over the years it has moved a total of 11,000 tons and counting.

Going co-op

Since its founding, the firm has won contracts with municipalities, school districts and businesses, large zero-waste concert events, restaurants and catering services. This summer the firm became a co-op, called Collective Resource Compost Cooperative, which enables it to distribute shares to employees and customers to help grow the business. In addition, Collective Resource is a member of two larger co-ops that help each other out with advice and mutual support (hence the name “cooperative”).

“If I’d known how much support I would get [from other co-op members], I would have done this a long time ago!” Howard said.

“I liked the idea of having it owned by the community and the employees because it’s very community focused; we can’t do it without the rest of the community signing up.” She cites the firm’s mission statement: to “create community around sustainability.”

Light bulb moment

Howard’s dad worked as a tradesman doing tile and linoleum jobs when she was growing up in south suburban Homewood. She remembers his company slogan, “A Floor by George,” and how her older sister processed invoices. After high school, she learned bookkeeping and began operating an independent bookkeeping service. This morphed into office manager work with “some HR on the side.” But as an accountant/bookkeeper, she was only paid for the hours she worked, and she wanted a salary.

In the fall of 2009, she had an insight. As she started to increasingly “eat clean,” she looked at her food scraps and thought, “If it were easy to compost, a lot of people would do it.”

Composting, defined as the operation of recycling food scraps, has been in use for eons, but has only became more popular and easier to maintain over the last few decades.

In 2009, Illinois passed legislation streamlining the composting process throughout the state. Before then, food scraps had just been dumped into landfills. This led Howard to wonder: Why not rescue food scraps from the landfill? At the time, a small group of restaurants in Chicago had a pilot program, but nobody was doing container swap residential pickup. Even having a separate container for food waste was unknown.

Howard noted, “I kind of created it all, setting up routes, route orders, first in my car, then my son Kevin in my car, then both of us doing it on a truck, then we went into 32 gallon totes … the whole thing evolved,” she said.

Howard had no problem setting up the routes and orders because she had already been an office manager. The problem was more around scaling up and help finding and using a more sophisticated customer database.

Scaling up the operation

In 2015, Howard was selected to participate in a free 13-week Goldman Sachs seminar called “10,000 Small Businesses,” which she likened to “a little mini MBA.”

One of her classmates told her about a database program that allowed a firm to maintain a much more detailed customer database, including “outcomes” so drivers could report what happened at the customer location.

“Learning that was a lot of fun,” Howard said. After starting with a Yahoo calendar, she moved to crude software that didn’t meet the firm’s needs, and now uses an excellent program originally created by Intuit.

The process essentially entails picking up client compost and delivering it to a large composting facility. But scaling up to do that efficiently and effectively meant adding more employees and acquiring more trucks and containers, which in turn meant getting to a higher level of cleaning the containers.

Initially, dirty containers were dropped off and washed in a friend’s basement. As containers increased, Howard moved the operation to a friend’s residential garage. When it “really got serious” she moved the operation to a car wash, where employees could use a power wash.

Now, with their new Skokie space, containers are washed at the industrial park. The facility is used for the larger 32-gallon totes as well as the 5-gallon buckets. “It’s quite an operation,” she said.

Barrows, the general manager, has worked for Collective Resource for four years. “We are all mission-driven, both individually and as a company,” he stated proudly, “and we want to divert as much waste from the landfill as we can.”

A look inside the facility

At Collective Resource’s facility, which consists of two side-by-side buildings in a small but busy industrial area in Skokie, cleaning requires four or five people in the garage area for a three- to four-hour shift, using a “super serious power washer.” Employees suit up and commence the spraying as trucks come in, and it’s intense and hot work.

“We can’t use air conditioning because trucks are constantly coming and going,” explained Barrows, “but we have big fans.” Some of the staff have been there several years, and full-time employees working 30-plus hours a week can access health insurance benefits.

The two buildings are 2,200 and 3,100 square feet in size. One has a makeshift office and a place for staff members to don their work suits, but most of that building consists of the washing area. The other building is where the actual compost briefly resides, in big bins, until it is trucked down the highway to the waste transfer compost site.

Back at her basement home office, Howard scans two large desk monitors to prepare the next morning’s loading report. On this particular day, drivers will need 408 five-gallon buckets and 256 32-gallon totes to start the day’s route. Buckets and totes will need to be washed when they came back that afternoon, to be readied for the following morning.

In essence, the whole operation is cyclical – the drop off and pick up of the compost, exchange of the containers, the daily washing of the buckets and totes, and the delivery of the collected compost to the compost site comprise a cycle which repeats all week.

Work-life balance

Howard refuses to be “on call” 24/7. She tries to work 35 to 40 hours over five days a week. “I really feel that work-life balance is part of the equation; I wasn’t called to do this to kill myself,” she stated plainly. She admitted that during the most recent transition, she does occasionally “go into overtime.” Business is booming, especially from large entities that plan big events and have green committees, and also for condo and apartment buildings.

The company has won a number of awards, including the Walter Lukansky Environmental Stewardship Award, a Glenview Environmental Sustainability Award, a Governor’s Award, another at Dewey School, and of course the municipal agreements themselves, which are franchise “awards” for the education and outreach as well as the service provided by the co-op.

The best award of all, Howard said, is “being kind to Mother Earth,” and acting responsibly in our communities. 

For more information about Collective Resource’s history, activities and mission, visit the recently redesigned website.