Happy Friday — we’re back with more Hot Bones after a week where allergies wanted us all dead. Rain has arrived. Happy to be here today.

Last edition was all about how solar panels and backup batteries are really great for your energy bill and your heart rate when there’s a power outage in the neighborhood. Locals weighed in. 

And the good follow-up news is that regardless of wherever we are with tariffs when this edition hits your inbox, the solar industry has already amassed a huge stockpile of panels to reduce price increases.

This edition, we’re talking about dirt.

G and I have been using Black Bear Composting since we moved to Charlottesville last summer, mainly as a way to get rid of yard waste and recently to toss some of our food scraps somewhere other than the trash can to landfill pipeline. 

I’ve wanted to learn more about how the company works, but the thing about composting is that it runs directly counter to a germaphobe’s way of life: put leftovers, moldy food, sodden leaves, and other dirty junk in a big pile, let it sit, and then add more gross organic matter and let that cook too. My code of conduct is: clean instantly, leave nothing behind, shower after. 

Composting also defies a germaphobe’s laws of physics because months later, all that goopy mess turns into glorious, good-smelling dirt. Gardening gold, some say. I say, sorcery. 

So I was in a bind about how to learn more about Black Bear Composting without, you know, getting anywhere near the composting bins. That’s why I was delighted when G told me that this April we’d be getting our free annual delivery of compost — the finished compost, that is. I emailed Black Bear to see if I could ride along for the deliveries.

I got an email from Eric not too long after (yes, does Tuesday work, where should we meet). Not one to jump in a stranger’s truck without doing my due diligence, I searched Eric on LinkedIn. He’s got one of the better English major career trajectory stories.

He founded Black Bear in 2011 after years in software and website design in Chicago. One of his biggest clients was a commercial bathroom company, so “we did a lot of work with toilets and sinks and showers,” Eric told me later. When he moved back to Virginia with his family, one thing was clear: “I was tired of selling toilets.” 

Instead of leaning into non-toilet websites, he made a big switch: “I wanted to do something sustainable and this was it.” Black Bear Composting was born. “My wife’s been really cool. …The rest of my family thought I was nuts.”

Now, nearly 15 years later, BB’s Chief Composting Officer was double-parked in front of my house — and I was fighting off a moment of latent germy panic after seeing the open-air truck full of 21 huge composting bins.

Brief panic, though, as Eric began dumping one of the bins onto a tarp in our driveway, and a rush of earthy, garden-ready compost poured out. 

Today’s route was a dozen drop-offs around western Cville, giving me a prime opportunity to get to see some new streets and know the neighborhood better.

When Eric started BB, the pickup and delivery drivers were using printed out Excel spreadsheets to plan their route through the city. As you might imagine, it was a nightmare of loose papers and scribbled notes as drivers traveled the 35 miles from Waynesboro (where the composting facility is) to Cville (BB’s biggest market). 

Now, there’s an app for that. It looks pretty much the same as Waze or Uber Eats, but it’s just for composting companies to help them optimize their routes, check customer notes, avoid dicey U-turns, etc. The guy who designed it actually used to run a company like BB.

Eric marked our house as complete on Uber Compost, and we headed down the street for our first official stop.

There’s this rush of panic and excitement that would happen at pretty much every house we visited: someone running out in bare feet asking Eric if he’d wait for just two seconds while they grabbed a tarp. A dog would be barking from inside the front window. And in the case of this first house, a mom and her toddler were standing on the stoop, staring: “He really likes trucks.”

Hell yeah, that truck is cool! And the dirt is too. As a novice gardener, I was only just beginning to realize compost is one of those natural phenomena that defies human logic – like butterflies traveling from Mexico to the Great Lakes, or dogs knowing not to step in their own vomit even if they might eat it later.

Compost is amazing for plants whether it’s zinnias in a pot on your fire escape, hydrangeas in your backyard, or cucumbers in a community garden down the block. It’s chock full of nutrients, it retains water (reducing runoff), it even revitalizes the soil around it. And all this comes from food crud we were going to throw in the trash?

Eventually, the BB customer would procure a tarp and we’d get to send 250 pounds of compost over the edge of the truck and onto the ground cloth. Sometimes that tip-over felt practically ceremonious, the full circle finally completed. 

“The part we enjoy… the most [is] making this stuff, then bringing it back,” Eric said. “Otherwise, we’d just call [ourselves] trash guys.”

We kept rolling through the neighborhood — Eric somehow driving a huge truck, backing into people’s driveways without hitting cars, mailboxes, or trash cans; answering logistics calls and shifting schedules; and dealing with the fly buzzing around his ear asking him question after question.

He told me the compost we were delivering was packed last night at their facility over the mountains. (If you want to see what the “in-process” compost looks like, Eric did a PBS interview a few years back here.) This vintage itself had been cooking for roughly the past 5 months. 

It stops smelling like waste after about a month, he said.

As a commercial facility, BB can compost organic matter faster than backyard composters usually can. “Part of our daily job is turning rows and adding more where we can and then screening it at the very end,” Eric told me. 

Screening is literally putting the almost-finished compost through a large machine. Anything that’s smaller than the soil goes on one side. “Anything that’s bigger goes into another pile.” For example, the BB team has found the following:

I can confirm that when we dropped off two bins of finished compost at the house with the white and blue lilacs, there were no stereos visible. I can also confirm the lilacs smelled absolutely out of this world. God I love spring.

Of course, it also helps to not be smelling thousands of beet rinds. In addition to working with residents, BB works with schools (including UVA), restaurants and grocery stores (like Wegmans and Whole Foods), as well as other businesses. Like an enterprise-level vegetable stock manufacturer.

This specific company would use cabbage, carrots, onions, you name it, to make their vegetable stock. “Then they press the solids, and we would get [them],” Eric said, “which sounds awesome, but based on their process, it stunk so bad.”

When the trailers of pressed beets arrived at BB’s facility, “we would try to mix it in as quickly as possible, but there’d be days of going to work and before I even got there I could smell it.”

Eventually BB suggested a more industrial facility would serve these vegetable stock brokers better.

The compost tea is that the bigger facility ended up getting into “serious problems with their neighbors for the smells, and they’re an industrial place out in the boonies, and had to go through all sorts of extra steps to address that.”

Meaning: “In that situation, there's basically aerosols you can spray into the air near your facility that is basically perfume,” Eric explained. They have a whole perimeter of perfumers set up, I would presume exactly like the Dior for Men greeters at Saks. 

Might I suggest the lilac scent?

So customers can put notes in Uber Compost about where they’d like their delivery (usually “tarp in the driveway”), but sometimes we’d get more creative signs.

At this point in the ride, the sky was a bright blue, trees were blooming left and right, and I was being lulled into a compost hypnosis in the warm sunny spot of the truck cab. It was all incredibly idyllic, as we delivered fresh clean magic dirt to families who drive Subarus and have kids who make chalk drawings for the compost man.

It reminded me of that iconic scene from Father of the Bride Part II (if you know you know) where Steve Martin and Diane Keaton have just found out they’re about to have another kid at age 60+.

Our compost truck was the Diane Keaton truck. But we kept passing Black Bear pickup buckets in other people’s driveways. I wondered if later in the day, the BB pickup truck would see the Steve Martin side: grubby old bananas, endless leaves and hedge clippings, maybe some sort of RFK decomposing bear in the bottom of the barrel.

I’ll stop the compost / parenthood metaphor before it gets weird, but the great thing about both Steve and Diane’s side of the car is that all this goodness and crap is being kept out of landfills regardless. That’s really good, because when organic matter ends up in landfills, it decomposes and releases the super potent greenhouse gas called methane.

The EPA actually reports that food waste is the single most common material to be sent to landfills or incinerated in the US right now.

Stats or no stats, it’s pretty cool that BB has over 1,300 customers in the area who put their green bins out weekly, full of loose smelly food and oily pizza boxes and soggy paper towels.

What’s even cooler is being Steve Martin for the day and delivering the finished product.