Urban Composting Emerges as Key Property Amenity and ESG Strategy

“Food waste in this country is actually responsible for three times more emissions than the entire airline industry… addressing food waste has a larger opportunity than EVs, recycling, tropical reforestation, and public transit combined.” — Lily Wang, Founder & CEO of Demi

In the competitive world of urban real estate, property managers and developers continuously search for amenities that both attract residents and align with increasingly stringent sustainability requirements. As composting mandates spread across major metropolitan areas, one startup is converting this potential operational challenge into a competitive advantage.

The Untapped Opportunity in Food Waste

Lily Wang’s journey to founding Demi began with personal experience and a keen observation of America’s urban infrastructure. Growing up in a family that practiced composting as a fundamental value—influenced by her father’s experience working on rice farms—Wang developed a deep appreciation for natural resource cycles.

“It was just second nature to me,” Wang explains. When she began living in dense urban environments, she encountered the significant gap between sustainability aspirations and practical realities. “I was trying to keep up my habit of composting in this small space, and just realizing that it was way too hard. I was freezing down my food waste, waiting until the spring, biking it to the farmers market, and thinking ‘there has to be a better way than this,'” Wang recounts.

The scale of the opportunity is staggering. According to Wang, the food waste Americans currently send to landfills could produce approximately $110 billion worth of fertilizer, or generate enough energy to power 2.6 million homes for a year.

The climate impact is equally significant. “When you send food waste to landfills, it’s usually in plastic bags… starved of oxygen, that food waste can’t actually decompose properly,” Wang explains. “Without oxygen, it’s decomposing anaerobically, and so it ends up producing methane, which is a greenhouse gas that’s 80 times more potent than CO2.”

Regulatory Momentum Creates Market Opportunity

For property owners and managers, this environmental challenge is increasingly becoming a regulatory obligation. Wang notes that “by 2026, it’s expected that 50% of America is actually going to be required to compost.”

Recent legislation underscores this trend:

• New York passing Local Law 85
• Austin’s Universal Recycling Ordinance now includes composting mandates for multi-family buildings
• California’s SB 1383 implementation
• Denver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have all passed similar requirements

“The burden ends up falling on these building owners and managers to find a solution,” Wang points out. “The only solution that really exists today for them is to have a big dumpster just sitting somewhere on site, and that introduces a whole host of other issues… it smells bad, residents don’t want to use it, people don’t actually engage with it, and so then they get fined. It’s kind of a nightmare for them.”

A New Approach to Urban Composting

Wang’s company, Demi, has developed what she describes as an “IoT, autonomous organics collection system” designed specifically for urban buildings. The system is:

• Temperature-controlled
• Odorless and sealed (preventing pest issues)
• Accessible 24/7 in common areas (rather than outside dumpster locations)
• Equipped with specialized liners for clean collection

Perhaps most innovatively, the entire experience is gamified through a mobile app that tracks resident participation, visualizes environmental impact, and offers rewards through partnerships.

“Residents can really see the actual impact that their actions are making on the planet. They can compete with their neighbors… and earn rewards from some of the partners that are on our platform,” Wang explains.

This gamification has proven surprisingly effective in changing daily habits. “We’ve gotten quite a lot of feedback about how that’s some of our users’ favorite feature,” Wang shares. “They can see who else in the building is composting. We have this leaderboard, and they end up competing to be at the top of it.”

The human impact goes beyond casual interest—it’s creating genuine behavioral change. “It becomes this whole thing where they don’t want to miss a week of composting because they don’t want to break their streak,” Wang explains. “They’ll even email us to be like, ‘Hey, I’m going on vacation next week, can you like pause this nice streak so that I don’t lose it?'” These personal interactions show how technology and game mechanics can turn what was once a chore into a community-building activity that residents genuinely care about.

Tier 1 Real Estate Partners Validate the Model

Demi has already secured partnerships with some of the industry’s most forward-thinking property owners and managers. Green Cities was an early adopter, eventually rolling out the service across their entire Chicago portfolio after a successful pilot.

This partnership opened doors to Greystar, which now features Demi in four Chicago properties. Willow Bridge and Hines have also implemented the solution, with Hines recently expanding beyond residential to introduce Demi in commercial office spaces.

The commercial application points to growing corporate interest in ESG compliance and tenant amenities. Wang explains: “A lot of these larger tenants have big ESG commitments, net zero goals, and are always trying to find ways to kind of tap into those… being able to offer that as an amenity or as a service to their tenants is a big draw.”

The Future: Data and Diversion Metrics

As Wang looks at industry trends, she identifies an emerging focus on waste metrics within building performance standards. “The next biggest category that comes after energy is often waste… if these big owners and operators are looking for ways to get closer to net zero, waste is that next big category to tackle after energy.”

Unlike energy consumption, which can be tracked through utility submetering, waste diversion lacks robust data collection methods. “It’s actually really, really difficult for them to get some of that diversion data,” Wang notes, suggesting an opportunity for solutions that provide “insights into diversion data and benchmarking in a similar way to utility submetering but for waste.”

Expansion Plans

Demi is actively preparing to scale, with imminent plans to launch in New York City supported by an upcoming venture capital raise. The company is primarily targeting “market rate luxury, typically classic high-rise buildings” for its initial expansion, though Wang expresses a longer-term goal to serve the entire market.

Strategic Value for Real Estate Professionals

For property owners, managers, and developers operating in urban markets, composting solutions are rapidly shifting from optional sustainability initiatives to critical operational considerations. Early adopters are finding that the right solution can simultaneously:

• Ensure compliance with increasingly common regulatory mandates
• Enhance tenant experiences through convenient, engaging amenities
• Support ESG reporting with measurable waste diversion metrics
• Differentiate properties in competitive rental markets

As Wang puts it: “Even if they don’t live in mandated geographies, folks that are interested in sustainability and looking to hit Net Zero, composting is a great way to do that.”