This story has been updated to clarify the distinction between Mike Larrivee’s composting services as “the Compost Fairy” and the nonprofit he founded, “the Compost Fairy.”

Mike Larrivee, known locally as “the Compost Fairy,” has revived Memphis’ only composting service with a goal of slowly building back an operation that ground to a halt last summer.

Larrivee started the city’s only curbside compost service in 2017. He would wake up at 3 a.m. and drive across Shelby County in a pickup truck to collect buckets of food scraps and yard trimmings before heading to his full-time job as a geologist. 

People would leave buckets of waste on their curbs, and Larrivee would return fresh soil in its place, hence the nickname “the Compost Fairy” — the namesake of the nonprofit he founded. 

At its peak, the Compost Fairy had more than 2,000 customers, but due to an abrupt closure last summer under different leadership, Memphis was left without a composting service for months. 

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But as of January, Larrivee and his “assistant fairy” Patrick Gridley are offering a composting service again, albeit more limited than before. About 100 customers pay $20 a month to drop off organic waste, such as food scraps, in bins at the Memphis Urban Wood campus in North Memphis at the intersection of North Watkins Street and Chelsea Avenue.

Larrivee’s revival of composting in Memphis is under his moniker “the Compost Fairy,” but the endeavor is separate from the nonprofit of the same name. 

Larrivee announced the return on his personal Facebook page. More than 100 people signed up within a few days, and he said there are hundreds more on his waitlist.

Whatever customers drop off, Larrivee and Gridley process at the same site. For now, they’ll send soil back to customers twice a year.

“We’re trying to scale it carefully because the last thing either one of us want to do after all the bullsh-- that happened is pull something back away from folks,” Larrivee said.

At the Compost Fairy’s peak, thousands of people paid for the curbside pick-ups, and in 2020, the Compost Fairy partnered with Atlas Organics in a bid to keep twice as much waste out of local landfills.

About 90% of the organic waste in Shelby County that could be composted ends up in landfills, and they are one of the biggest sources of methane emissions globally. 

But a couple years after the Compost Fairy and Atlas joined forces, a sustainable infrastructure company acquired Atlas, and the Compost Fairy ended the partnership, saying the move didn’t align with its original mission.

Atlas inherited the Compost Fairy’s staff and customer base, but the numbers dwindled. In August 2023, about a year after the partnership with the Compost Fairy ended, Atlas left town, citing worker shortages and high labor and fuel costs as the reason for its exit.

Larrivee saw Atlas’ leaving as a chance to take over composting locally again. He tried to avoid a lapse in service, but contract negotiations with the City of Memphis, which owned the composting site, hit a standstill.

“We’re trying to scale it carefully because the last thing either one of us want to do after all the bullsh-- that happened is pull something back away from folks.”

Mike Larrivee

“We have heard from so many people how much it pained them to be throwing out their food scraps and other compostables,” Gridley told The Daily Memphian. “We heard how much their trash output increased. A fair few folks even held on to their scraps waiting for us to come back.” 

Gridley said they’re helping people compost “in a way that makes sense for them personally, for Memphis generally and for the environment ultimately.” 

The City of Memphis put out of request for bids last fall for someone to run a composting facility. Under the provisional terms, the city would collect organic waste and deliver it to the contractor who would compost it and market the final product for at least the next decade.

“Given all the other opportunities we had at the time, it didn’t make sense, so we didn’t bid it,” Larrivee said.

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The city originally wanted to find a contractor by the end of the year, but they’re running months behind schedule. A city spokesperson said they received one bid and hope to award the contract by mid-March.

Things could change for the Compost Fairy once that happens. Larrivee hopes to work with the city’s new composter to revive the curbside pickup service and process the waste they collect at the city’s site. If not, Larrivee said they’ll find another place to compost.

“One way or another, it’s coming back,” Larrivee said.