Many eco-conscious consumers purchase organic food, but few stop to think about how they dispose of their leftover wrappers.

Stefan Grundmann (’06) and Ryan Walter (’06) launched The Compost Crew in April to help reduce the amount of waste in landfills by providing an accessible way to dispose trash in a sustainable manner.

For $9 a week, the company will pick up food scraps and other organic trash weekly at a customer’s house and deliver it to a western Montgomery partner farm. There, the waste will be composted into nutrient-rich soil.

Every six months, clients can choose to receive 10 percent of the trash weight collected at their houses returned as soil. Customers may also choose to donate the soil to the farm.

Grundmann and Walter created The Compost Crew after researching the startling statistics associated with America’s trash output, Grundmann said. Twenty-three percent of solid waste in America is organic and could therefore be composted instead of sent to a landfill, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The goal of The Compost Crew is to alert people to the lasting environmental effects of trash, even after it leaves their house, Grundmann said.

“Our mission is to create more and more ‘full-cycle consumers’ through our service,” Grundmann said. “So many people are making smart and conscientious decisions to buy organic food, and we love this. That’s great on what I like to call ‘the front end,’ but then on ‘the back end,’ they throw away this food into a system that hasn’t really changed much in 60 years.”

The Compost Crew service will be available to residents in 12 Montgomery County and Northwest D.C. zip codes beginning in mid-May. The company hopes to expand to commercial establishments in the future and spread the word about their composting service.

“Everyone can agree that composting is a good thing,” Grundmann said. “We’re just trying to make it easier for people to start.”