A Maine company known for collecting and composting food scraps is ramping up its efforts, taking on waste collection in Bath and plans to compete to take on trash contracts for other towns.

Garbage to Garden this month started collecting solid waste and recycling in Bath. The goal is to take over solid waste disposal for more cities and towns, according to Tyler Frank, founder and president of Garbage to Garden.

“We service a lot of other communities, but only in the sense that we pick up food waste from households that subscribe,” Frank said. “This is our first trash-and-recycle contract, and we certainly don’t expect it to be the last. We think this is the beginning of a whole new avenue of our business.”

Bath’s contract with Garbage to Garden is nearly $100,000 less than the deal offered by its previous provider, Vermont-based Casella Waste Systems, Inc., according to Julie Ambrosino, vice chairperson of the Bath City Council. The city unanimously voted to adopt a new contract with Garbage to Garden on May 21, with the first day of collection beginning on June 30. Bath was under contract with Casella for around 20 years and was nearing the end of the agreement.

“It also gave us more time because they were not forcing us to go to automation, which would include new bins,” Ambrosino said. “And there wasn’t a lot of transparency at that moment in what we first saw with Casella’s offering for their contract about ADA accessibility, seniors and people who might be differently abled bringing their new cans to the proper place on the curb.”

The City Council found that the Garbage to Garden initiative better aligned with the city’s 2023 Comprehensive Plan, as well as Resilient Bath, which offered an expanded recyclables program with the Portland-based recycling center ecomaine, Ambrosino said.

Ecomaine accepts a wider variety of recyclables, including pizza boxes, and a broader range of plastic containers, such as milk cartons or folded cardboard boxes with plastic caps, like those used for chicken broth. The recyclables collected by Garbage to Garden in Bath have been going to ecomaine since July 1, 2025. The trash that Garbage to Garden picks up is dumped at the Bath landfill.

Bath has a pay-as-you-throw program, in which residents pay for trash removal services on a per-bag basis, as a way to increase revenue to support the city’s solid waste program. Casella was considering adding a new device that reads the color coding as a form of automation of the city’s blue bags onto the pay-as-you-throw program, accompanied by a different fee, according to Ambrosino. Garbage to Garden has no automation for pay-as-you-throw.

Ambrosino also considered how to extend the life of the Bath landfill, from which the pay-as-you-throw program had already diverted a significant amount of solid waste since its implementation a decade ago.

Casella is a publicly traded company with billions in revenue. In contrast, Garbage to Garden has $10 million in revenue. Bath took a leap of faith by signing with a smaller business, Frank said. Garbage to Garden also collects food waste for 27,000 residents in Boston, Massachusetts, and around 6,000 residents in Medford, Massachusetts.

There have only been a handful of missed service pickups, but this has mainly been due to the change in the order in which the trash gets collected with the new solid waste removal service. The pickup schedule is Monday through Thursday at 7 a.m., with each day dedicated to a specific part of the city.