You know composting is good. Perhaps you’re doing it yourself on a small scale, collecting the organic waste from your kitchen and turning it into rich soil for your garden. But what happens to that larger scale organic matter that sometimes passes through your life? Where does yard debris go after you put it on the curb?

The surprising answers to those questions led two young entrepreneurs—Tyler Miller, and Nau alum Pierce Louis—to start Dirt Hugger, a local composting company that creates sustainable economies by collecting, processing, and utilizing valuable organic nutrients locally. It turns out that without access to composting services, organic materials are mostly processed in unsustainable ways: they are dumped in landfills where they produce 40% of the nation’s methane gas emissions, burned in open air piles, or trucked long distances to urban processing centers.

Tyler and Pierce are in the running for the Myoo Create Beat Waste Startup Challenge: as one of ten finalists, they’re up for a $15,000 grant from Adventure Ecology, the folks behind the Plastiki expedition. For nurturing the idea that organic waste has real nutrient value and that communities are strengthened when they retain that value locally rather than trucking it out of town, they’ve got our vote. Whether in compost or clothing, we need more of this kind of closed-loop thinking.