LEAF has approved a loan to Cooperative Energy, Recycling, and Organics (CERO), to help continue their award-winning commercial composting service.
Founded in 2012, CERO is a worker-owned cooperative located in Dorchester. The team is made up of dedicated, bilingual worker-owners who are connected to Boston’s working class and communities of color. Initially dissatisfied with the unacceptable wages and working conditions they experienced, Guadalupe Gonzalez teamed up with a group of MassCOSH worker center members, the Boston Workers Alliance, and Tim Hall, a founder of Roxbury Green Power, to form CERO.
CERO has made its process fast and easy for potential customers. After scheduling a CERO compost expert to stop by, within 15 minutes or less they can determine the volume of food waste your company produces. From there, CERO will drop off a new, industrial-grade compost cart for you to dump food scraps into throughout the day and when you’re ready to empty it, simply call and they will haul it away. To date, CERO has diverted 10,264,202 pounds of food waste from landfills, saved its customers $384,907 dollars in trash hauling expenses and the company prides itself on being the only Boston-based hauler that turns all of their organic material back into soil at local farms.
Keep up the great work, CERO, and thank you for continuing to support workplace democracy and new forms of community investment!