Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. So when Andy Brooks of Jamaica Plain found himself between jobs, he decided to create one.
The 37-year-old former Harvard Gazette reporter bootstrapped Bootstrap Compost, which bills itself as Greater Boston’s only year-round kitchen-scrap pickup service.
Brooks was visiting his sister in Vermont over Christmas in 2010 when he stumbled across a similar business.
“By New Year’s Day, I had fliers up around JP,” he said. “It was an experiment to see if people would bite.”
Within a week, Brooks picked up his first few buckets of compost. But his real break came as a result of riding around the neighborhood with a cart hooked up to his bike.
“People would stop and ask what I did,” he said.
Soon, the local newspaper caught on, and then a blogger, whose post led to a few dozen emails in a single day.
In May, Bootstrap Compost was selected as one of 125 finalists from a field of more than 1,200 applicants in this year’s $1.1 million MassChallenge start-up accelerator and competition. The company wasn’t one of the 26 money winners announced last week.
“I knew how valuable it would be, whether or not we won,” said Igor Kharitonenkov, Bootstrap’s co-founder and vice president. “We’ve learned so much from our mentors and fellow finalists.”
Today, the company has two full-time and four part-time employees and more than 325 residential and commercial subscribers, who pay between $10 and $32 per month. Each gets a 5-gallon bucket to fill with coffee grounds, egg shells, bones and other scraps of food over the course of a week.
Bootstrap then picks up the bucket and delivers the contents to an educational community garden in Mattapan or one of two working farms in Winchester and Dighton, where the scraps are used as fertilizer.
In return, subscribers over the course of a year receive 15 pounds or more of rich compost ready to be used in their own gardens or on their house plants.
But the real return, Kharitonenkov said, comes with knowing they’ve diverted unused food from landfills and contributed to a more sustainable food chain free of fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides.
“Every day, the United States generates enough food scraps to fill Gillette Stadium to the brim,” Kharitonenkov said.
But according to the Environmental Protection Agency, only about 3 percent of that is composted.