Commercial composting services for Austin, TX.
Moonshot Compost provides commercial composting pickup for Austin businesses as a City of Austin licensed hauler. We place sealed drums where your food waste is generated, weigh every drum at pickup and swap it for a clean, washed one.
Our service is designed to support compliance with Austin's Universal Recycling Ordinance (URO), from the containers on your site to the records behind your annual organics plan. We also serve Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Waco.
What Austin requires of businesses with food waste.
Most Austin businesses that prepare or serve food produce food waste every day. When it goes out with the trash, it ends up in a landfill, where it breaks down without oxygen and produces methane. The City of Austin's URO is designed to keep that material out of the landfill.
Who the ordinance covers
Any business with a City of Austin food permit must give its employees convenient access to at least one way to divert organic material. The city accepts three options: donating food, feeding animals and composting.
Multifamily properties with five or more units have their own requirement. Since October 1, 2024, they must give residents access to composting, with one gallon of capacity per unit. Our multifamily composting programs cover the resident side of that rule.
What the city asks you to do each year
The City of Austin lists these requirements for food-permitted businesses:
Submit an organics plan every year between October 1 and February 1.
If a hauler collects your organics, include an invoice or contract from a licensed hauler that shows container size, number of containers and collection frequency.
Post signs in two languages that name the materials each container accepts.
Educate employees within 30 days of hire, whenever the program changes and once a year.
Keep a record of when that education takes place.
Place outdoor organics containers within 25 feet of your landfill trash containers.
The full requirements are on the City of Austin's commercial organics page. For background on the city's wider plan, read how food waste fits into Austin's Zero Waste Goal.
Austin businesses we work with.
We serve businesses and properties across Austin that generate food waste every day, including:
Restaurants
Restaurant kitchens fall under Austin's food-permit rule, and most of their food waste comes from the prep line. We place drums where prep happens, so staff can sort without extra steps. See how Snarf's Sandwiches composts across five Austin locations.
Multifamily properties
Restaurant kitchens fall under Austin's food-permit rule, and most of their food waste comes from the prep line. We place drums where prep happens, so staff can sort without extra steps. See how Snarf's Sandwiches composts across five Austin locations.
Offices and corporate campuses
Restaurant kitchens fall under Austin's food-permit rule, and most of their food waste comes from the prep line. We place drums where prep happens, so staff can sort without extra steps. See how Snarf's Sandwiches composts across five Austin locations.
Schools and universities
Restaurant kitchens fall under Austin's food-permit rule, and most of their food waste comes from the prep line. We place drums where prep happens, so staff can sort without extra steps. See how Snarf's Sandwiches composts across five Austin locations.
Divert your food waste in 3 easy steps.
1
Set Aside Compostables
Put your food waste in a Moonshot Compost-provided container.
2
We Pick Up Your Food Waste
3
We pick it up according to the agreed schedule and swap it with a clean container.
We Report Your Impact
We calculate the pounds diverted from landfills and three carbon equivalences on your personalized dashboard.
Austin – the “keep-it-weird” capital of Texas – is a leader in pushing the state towards a zero-waste future, implementing programs like the Universal Recycling Ordinance (URO) to ensure that organic waste and recyclable materials stay out of landfills. That’s where Moonshot Compost can help with commercial composting and food waste hauling.
See how food waste diversion supports Austin’s Zero Waste Goal.
With our commercial composting program, we make the process of collecting food waste sweet and simple, providing your company with the tools and training you and your employees need to help keep Austin green. Here’s some of what we have to offer:
Custom and flexible plans
Our aim is to fit your business with the right plan, tailored to your specific needs.
Month to month contracts
No need to get locked into a long contract that doesn’t meet your needs as your company grows and changes.
Clean containers, every time
We not only provide you with the drums you need for collecting food waste, we swap them out for clean ones at every collection.
A trained team
We take away the learning curve of food waste collection for you and your staff by providing training on composting as part of the onboarding process.
Reporting made easy
Our diversion board makes it easy to track and report the environmental impact your company is making through composting efforts.
Show off how much waste you’re diverting.
Your waste diversion achievements are easy to track and share via your personalized Diversion Dashboard.
You’ll find monthly and overall stats on how many pounds of waste you’ve diverted from landfills, the equivalent amount of emissions avoided, and more that you can use in your ESG reporting and sustainability marketing.
Discover advanced reporting with our Diversion Dashboard.
Making composting easy.
A clean container with each collection
Employee training to ensure your compost is uncontaminated
Simple list of what’s collectable.
See it here
How Texas restaurant groups are composting with Moonshot
How Snarf's Sandwiches built a zero-contamination composting program across five Austin locations.
Snarf's needed a diversion program that could keep up with high-volume sandwich production. Moonshot placed drums at prep points, trained staff in English and Spanish and matched pickups to each location's volume. Across all five locations, Snarf's has diverted 44,628 lbs. of organic waste with zero contamination, and every pound is tracked for ESG and Scope 3 reporting.
or
How Tacodeli closed the loop on local across Austin, Dallas and Houston.
Tacodeli cooks from scratch with local, seasonal ingredients and wanted its prep waste to go back to Texas soil. Moonshot placed drums at the cutting board, trained staff in English and Spanish and runs pickups on its own routes. Tacodeli has diverted 1,020,582 lbs. of organic waste across three markets, with every drum weighed at pickup and reported weekly for each location.
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What happens to your food waste?
We think it’s really cool how spoiled food and leftovers can become a valuable commodity when given enough time and a place to relax. Where is that, you ask?
Your Moonshot collections are transformed into compost at commercial composting facilities, after which it finds multiple practical applications.
What Austin requires of businesses with food waste.
Most Austin businesses that prepare or serve food produce food waste every day. When it goes out with the trash, it ends up in a landfill, where it breaks down without oxygen and produces methane. The City of Austin's URO is designed to keep that material out of the landfill.
Who the ordinance covers
Any business with a City of Austin food permit must give its employees convenient access to at least one way to divert organic material. The city accepts three options: donating food, feeding animals and composting.
Multifamily properties with five or more units have their own requirement. Since October 1, 2024, they must give residents access to composting, with one gallon of capacity per unit. Our multifamily composting programs cover the resident side of that rule.
Resources to launch and level up your company’s composting program.
Austin's Zero Waste Goal: How food waste regulations fit into the bigger picture
Tips for overcoming obstacles and mastering composting in the workplace
Tips for getting staff onboard with a composting program
Networking through sustainability: Composting can open doors to new business opportunities
Browse all our composting resources to inspire, start, and succeed.
Get your custom composting quote.
Get in touch with us to reduce your ecological footprint, give back to your community, and demonstrate your ESG commitment
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Commercial composting FAQs.
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For our commercial services we typically use 55-gallon drums, though container selection is part of our onboarding process.
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As part of your onboarding, we consult with you to determine a pickup schedule that works for you. In most cases, we collect no more than twice per week.
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We take everything we collect to a compost facility, where the food waste is mixed with vegetative waste to become compost. Learn more about what happens to your food waste.
All your questions answered – more commercial composting FAQs.
These companies trust Moonshot Compost.
Corporations
Food Service
Education
