28 entrepreneurs Turning waste into a winner


Inspiration for a new business can come from the unlikeliest of places. For Gwen Powell, it came from the apple cores, banana peels, teabags and coffee grounds thrown into the office rubbish bins. Just over three years ago, she left a legal career spanning 17 years to set up kompost, the on-site food waste recycling company, which today counts SEGRO HQ, Softcat, Henley Business School, Seacourt, the New Economics Foundation, GSK and Wolseley UK among its growing list of clients. On the cusp of taking the business to the next level, Powell – dubbed “the compost girl” – talked to Eleanor Harris about her dream to roll it out across the country, her love affair with worms, and why she considers herself more entrepreneur than eco-warrior


Gwen Powell is founding director of kompost, based in Cippenham, Slough. She was born in 1974 in Pretoria, South Africa, and lived there until the age of 14, when her family moved to a farm near the village of Wakkerstroom in Mpumalanga. After high school she did a course in office administration, and got her first job as a secretary in a law firm. Over the next 16 years she worked her way up to become a paralegal in conveyancing, and during that time immigrated to the UK. She founded kompost in August 2009, and it has two employees – Powell, and her partner Dennis Geertsen. The company achieved second place in SEGRO's The Entrepreneur Competition 2013 and has been shortlisted for the Resource Revolution Awards 2013, in the category Beyond Zero Waste Achievement. Powell is a CIWM affiliate, a member of AfOR, FSB, 2degrees and NISP, and also a proud Rotarian. She lives in Cippenham with Geertsen and their rescued dog, Sam. Follow her blog at kompostgirl.blogspot.com


compost bins to encourage residential composting – we had been spending lots of money on compost for the garden, so we took up the challenge and started composting. Back at Rank I saw all these teabags, coffee grounds, banana peels and apple cores being chucked into the rubbish bin which was going to landfill. There were recycling stations for paper and plastic, but not for food waste. I thought to myself “no way, I can make more compost at home”, so I put down some food waste caddies in the kitchens for the staff. Within three days, you won’t believe it, I was walking home with bags full of food scraps – it just took off. I put up six more compost bins in our garden, bought 20kg of composting worms and chucked them in. Three months later I had the most beautiful compost, it was just stunning, black, crumbly, and I fell in love with earthworms.


Why did you set up your own business?


I was brought up in a family that always owned their own businesses. My parents had a coach touring business, and when they got tired of the road they bought a farm house and turned it into a guest house. We were roped in to help and had to work for our pocket money. Through the way that my parents raised me, I became quite sure that I wanted to do my own thing one day but then I got stuck in a legal job. I really enjoyed the security of the income, but then the property market collapsed and the firm I was working for started to struggle, and I took voluntary redundancy. I secured a year’s maternity cover contract at Rank, but I came to the point where I thought to myself “do I really want to go back to pushing paper around on a desk?” It was crunch time. I realised I needed to do something with my life, that was a conscious thing, but the idea of the business happened completely by accident.


What attracted you to the world of food waste?


At home, our borough council had delivered www.businessmag.co.uk


How did you turn that concept – and passion – into a business?


I did my research, figured out that you can do composting on-site at business premises. I put down compost bins, accelerated with composting worms, at Rank and a couple of other companies took us on to do the same for them. Already there was this movement towards getting food waste away from landfill. The fact that I could actually turn the concept into a business is something I was probably born with. I realised I needed something that could deal with proper catering waste: I found an in-vessel composter, made contact with the manufacturer, and rolled out the “komposter™”. I set up four trial sites, at no charge to the businesses, which we ran for 18 months, and really emerged myself into this new industry. The trial sites turned into paying clients, and I worked on marketing – I’ve done all of that myself because I didn’t have the funds, we were living from savings and credit cards – without the internet and social networking to do that, I don’t think this business would have been possible. I was very fortunate to be introduced to Norman Grundon, from Grundon Waste, in the early days of kompost and he said to


THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – MAY 2013


me – and this has given me so much confidence and hope – “we’ve been sitting around the boardroom table for years knowing that this issue with food waste is coming, but we didn’t know how to deal with it” – waste operators have to use a separate fleet of trucks to collect it, and the UK is running out of capacity with anaerobic digesters – “you don’t know what you’ve discovered, you’ve spotted a gap in the market.” We’ve come along, we’re giving a broad client care where we train each business how to do it and we stay with them – and it all happens there, on-site.


Is there one project that stands out for you?


Henley Business School really stands out for me. They have been super-supportive throughout our journey. They have gone on to install two komposter units, and to bring the process full circle they are growing herbs that go back into


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