So far, more than 200 of you have added your names to our email list, and for that we are grateful. Your enthusiasm about the prospect of composting at home or at work confirmed for us what we hoped was true: that people are ready to make their lives more sustainable through composting, and that the demand for a service such as Compost Cab is real.

To help meet this demand, today we updated this website — thanks to Jason Lemieux, John Lianoglou, and Noah Brosowsky for all the good work. There’s a ton of new (and we hope valuable) information throughout. And perhaps most important, we’re now taking sign-ups for new service. (Current subscribers: we’ll be in touch via email with specific instructions for filling in your account information.) Please click here for residential service, or here for commercial, and we’ll be picking up your organics in just a few weeks!

We look forward to working with you. Together we can build greener, healthier, more productive cities.

Finally, if you haven’t already seen it, please check out Erin Hartigan’s piece today for Tasting Table, the online food culture daily. It’s a really nice profile of what Compost Cab does and how it works, along with a great image of our window sticker. And not for nothing, if you join us as a charter customer, you’ll get a sticker for your window, too!

It’s amazing how quickly an idea can come together.

Earlier this year, I did a course in Commercial Urban Agriculture with Will Allen at Growing Power in Milwaukee. One three-day weekend a month for five months, I left my family in Washington DC and flew to Wisconsin to learn from the master how to grow food in a city.

I came to the CUA program primarily to pursue an idea I was working on to develop a series of sustainable rooftop farms, particularly in poor neighborhoods, in and around the nation’s capital. (Still something I’m slowly pursuing, if anyone’s interested in talking about it — that means you, real estate owners!) A related project — designing and manufacturing a modular urban composter/planter –  was also on my mind, especially as the engineering challenges of developing an affordable, light, leak-proof, rat-proof, odor-free composting unit for city-dwellers  became clearer.

My enthusiasm was pretty low when I flew into Milwaukee for our March session, the middle of my program. The February “snowmageddon” that enveloped DC — my older kids were off school for two full weeks! — significantly slowed progress on the productive rooftops idea. It turns out building owners don’t like to talk about putting half-a-foot of soil on their roofs when those same roofs are already covered in three-plus feet of snow. So on Friday, when it came time for breakout sessions, I decided to ride along on a compostables pickup run, with only a vague sense of it being applicable to my new venture. Barely 24 hours later, I had the basic model for Compost Cab fleshed out, a brief presentation put together, and the URL www.compostcab.com registered. I’ve been working on making Compost Cab a reality for about 4 1/2 months now. But the idea? It came together in a day.