Category: Meet the Compost People

If the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, would the offer of a big bowl of gumbo draw farmers — an independent and elusive market segment — to a talk about the benefits of compost use?

Ruth King, McGill’s compost sales account manager in southeastern North Carolina, decided to wield her ladle at Mike’s Service Center in Pink Hill to find out – and reports the answer is a resounding yes.…

Q:  What do you do at McGill?

A:   If I really tell people what I do, they look at me funny, so I just tell folks I do environmental consulting and waste management.

Food waste, paper waste, biosolids – disposing of waste properly and legally is always a difficult item to figure out.  I solve customer problems by coming up with legal and economic methods for disposing of waste streams that are good for everybody.…

I come by my passion for sustainability and composting honestly. Reduce, reuse, recycle was my mother’s subconscious mantra. Reduce was easy. We had no store-bought processed food. Everything we ate was cooked or made by my parents. I didn’t drink my first cola until I was in my 20s, my first beer well before that! Everything that entered our home was reused, every piece of string rolled up and put in a drawer. The grease-proof …

I grew up on a tobacco farm in Eastern North Carolina and will turn 60 this year. (Wow!)   My parents worked hard, and we lived off the land. Talk about sustainability — food waste went to the hogs; chicken manure went on the land.  My father took corn to the grist mill where the corn was ground and put in flowered cotton sacks. The sacks were laundered, and my mother made dresses for me. I …

Wow.  It’s been 20 years.

When Jim McGill decided he was ready to give up his environmental consulting business and go build a composting business, I was the lucky guy he invited along on the trip without a roadmap.  My background in agricultural science gave me an appreciation for the power of microbes, but converting that first batch of poultry litter into a product converted me into a believer in the power of composting.

As …

Q:  Project developer?  What’s that?

A: I suppose an analogy to a composer is close to the mark.  The spark of an idea becomes a cacophony of sounds swimming around in my head.  One by one, those noises and tones are isolated.  The instrument or voice making each sound is identified.  Then an organizational process commences, placing each note in its proper sequence, with just the right emphasis, just the right instrument.  Only then is …