O-Town Compost Expands Compost Pickup Service to Tampa Bay Region

By Charlie Pioli

The Central Florida-based food waste collection company now offers composting solutions for businesses, multi-family properties, and events in Tampa and St. Petersburg.

Orlando, FL – [July 1, 2025] – O-Town Compost, a leading food scraps collection and composting company in Central Florida, is proud to announce the expansion of its compost pickup service to the greater Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg, and Polk County areas. This move comes in response to growing demand from businesses, property managers, and event organizers seeking sustainable waste solutions.

Founded with a mission to keep food waste out of landfills, O-Town Compost offers convenient, odor and pest-free pickup and turns organic waste into nutrient-rich compost — promoting a more circular, regenerative economy. With this expansion, the company will begin servicing commercial businesses, multi-family residences, and green events throughout the Tampa Bay region.

O-Town Compost’s service helps cut methane emissions from food waste going to landfills — a major contributor to climate change. With every new account, the company furthers its goal of giving Floridians food waste recycling access, and extending the life of Central Florida landfills.

To learn more or sign up for compost service, visit www.otowncompost.com

The Vinoy Hotel in St. Pete - Soon to be composting

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O-Town Compost’s school supply drive is going on now til August 1st! Set out your gently-used supplies, and we’re collect it to be donated!

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If you have been happy with your service at O-Town Compost, please take a moment to leave us a Google Review. Click the image above or look us up on Google Maps to leave a review. Subscribers who leave a review with the name associated with their account will receive a $5 credit to their account. Thank You.

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First Batch of Compost Will Be Distributed to Subscribers Early!

To show our immense appreciation for our loyal Orlando subscribers in the time of the COVID19 pandemic, we thought it was time to give back, and move everyone’s distribution date up early. Due the shutdown, more people are at home cooking and gardening, and it just makes sense. This doesn’t mean that our subscribers WON’T receive their regularly scheduled share 6-months from their subscription date either. Everyone who selected to “receive” their share of compost will still be delivered an additional 20 lbs 6 months from the date they hit “subscribe.” All we ask is to please empty the bucket, and put it back on your porch for us to collect during a normal pickup day, so we can keep reusing them. (Fun Fact: The 3.5-gallon compost buckets are old cream cheese icing buckets from Publix!)

Four hundred pounds of compost is going out this week and next to our subscribers who selected to receive their shares, and 400 pounds are going to Fleet Farming as a donation to their urban gardening efforts. A total of 800 pounds of O-Town Black Gold will be recycled into the community to improve our soil’s health! That’s right…Thanks to your banana peels, flower trimmings, and coffee grounds we have finished the composting process on our first batch of compost! We encourage you to use it in your vegetable gardens, as a potting mix, or just sprinkle it through your lawn to improve the seeding process.

Isn’t #CommunityComposting a beautiful thing?

Why We Compost in Orlando

At O-Town Compost, we believe in a healthy balance of sustainable growth, which means giving back to the ecosystem what we take.

Orlando was once known for its agricultural presence. Citrus groves stretching as far as the eye could see, and farm land that sprawled from Apoka to Christmas with only a clump of buildings downtown to disrupt the horizon. Heck, I’ve even talked to an UCF alumni who remembers hitching up her horse outside her classrooms. Then, in 1971, Disney decided to open its famous resort and theme park, and the boom started.

Composting is a regenerative practice that allows us to bring back some of that natural habitat that we lost to development. Traditionally, compost replaces nutrients lost in the soil that were taken by the plants that eventually became our food. This fertility loss was replaced with organic compost after every crop cycle, introducing a cocktail of healthy bacteria and nutrients to began building the soil structure once again. It’s no joke when they say “it all starts with the soil.”

At the urban and suburban levels, reverting a small quarter acre lot from lawn to native habitat can invite bees, insects, butterflies, and birds completely altering the space to form a mini-ecosystem. That’s why at O-Town Compost we want to remain small and local to create mini-ecosystems of food waste collection to composting to growing food again. We are helping organizations and individuals change Orlando, pound by pound, into a hybrid between development and nature. A place where the ecosystem isn’t being wiped out, nor are the people being told to leave, but a coexistence. Sign up to start community composting in your neighborhood today!

Guiding Principles of Community Composting:

1. Resources recovered: Waste is reduced; food scraps and other organic materials are diverted from disposal and composted.

2. Locally based and closed loop: Organic materials are a community asset, and are generated and recycled into compost within the same neighborhood or community.

3. Organic materials returned to soils: Compost is used to enhance local soils, support local food production, and conserve natural ecology by improving soil structure and maintaining nutrients, carbon, and soil microorganisms.

4. Community-scaled and diverse: Composting infrastructure is diverse, distributed, and sustainable; systems are scaled to meet the needs of a self-defined community. (O-Town Compost is coming to West Orlando this summer!)

5. Community engaged, empowered, and educated: Compost programming engages and educates the community in food systems thinking, resource stewardship, or community sustainability, while providing solutions that empower individuals, businesses, and institutions to capture organic waste and retain it as a community resource.

6. Community supported: Aligns with community goals (such as healthy soils and healthy people) and is supported by the community it serves. The reverse is true, too; a community composting program supports community social, economic, and environmental well-being.