Andy Harpenau, the farm kid who started composting Omaha's food scraps

Andy Harpenau accepting the US Composting Council's 2025 Organics Diversion Program of the Year award for Soil Dynamics and Hillside Solutions

Founder of Gretna Sanitation, Soil Dynamics and Hillside Solutions

Andy Harpenau grew up on a Nebraska farm, built houses for a living, and in 2004 started a trash company with his family in Gretna. That company now picks up at thousands of homes. The yard waste it hauled every spring became the Omaha metro's first and only industrial compost farm. The compost from that farm now goes back onto Nebraska fields, into Omaha gardens, and, through the Compost Club, back to the households whose food scraps started the loop.

He'd rather be on a loader than in front of a camera, so most of what's written about him has been written by other people. This page collects it in one place.

  • Gretna Sanitation, 2004: trash, recycling and yard waste pickup for homes outside the City of Omaha
  • Soil Dynamics, 2011: industrial composting in Ashland, and the Downtown Omaha yard
  • Hillside Solutions, 2017: recycling and composting for businesses, schools and households
  • Hillside Fund, 2025: a nonprofit fund for composting in schools, on farms and for families who can't afford the service
How the three companies fit together

“This is Why We Compost”

A short documentary made for the Omaha Film Festival in 2019. Andy talks through why a trash hauler would start a compost farm, and what happens to a banana peel after the truck leaves.

Shot by Omaha filmmaker Mike Machian for the 2019 Omaha Film Festival.

How a trash company ended up growing soil

1

A farm, a hammer, and a dump truck

Andy was raised on a farm in Nebraska and spent his first working years as a homebuilder. The story he tells about getting into trash is short: he saw a dump truck go by and wondered how hard the business could be. In 2004 the Harpenau family started Gretna Sanitation, a landfill-and-recycling hauler for the towns and acreages around Omaha. It grew to thousands of residential customers and hundreds of commercial ones, and it still picks up in Sarpy, Douglas and Cass Counties today.

2

The spring problem

Every April the trucks came back heavy with grass clippings and leaves, and the landfill charged by the ton. Andy's first question was how to stop paying to bury something that rots on its own. In 2011 he leased 27 acres of farmland next to the Wildlife Safari Park in Ashland, bought a windrow turner that ran behind a tractor, and started Soil Dynamics. A tub grinder for trees came next, then a trommel screen. In 2014 the county permitted the site to take horse manure, manure from the safari park, and food scraps alongside the yard waste. That made it the Omaha area's first and only industrial composting facility, and the only local hauler that composts what it collects.

3

Closing the loop

Hillside Solutions came along in 2017 to connect the two: a company that could put compost carts in a school cafeteria or a corporate kitchen, haul them with Gretna's trucks, and process everything at Soil Dynamics. Before the pandemic, 22 schools and more than 10,000 students were separating food scraps. Creighton University, local restaurants and Fortune 500 offices followed. The Compost Club opened on Earth Day 2019 as a drop-off service for households, and in 2026 added curbside pickup. The Hillside Fund, set up in late 2025 as a component fund of the Midlands Community Foundation, supports composting in schools, on farms and for families who can't afford it.

The part he's proudest of: compost on Nebraska farm fields

Most residential compost programs in the country sell their finished product to landscapers and gardeners. Soil Dynamics sends a share of its compost to Nebraska farms, where it finishes breaking down in the field and replaces part of the synthetic nitrogen a crop would otherwise get.

Nitrates in Nebraska well water have been rising for years, and over-application of nitrogen on row crops is a primary source. Compost doesn't replace fertilizer one for one, and agronomists still recommend some commercial nitrogen. But every ton of compost spread on a field is nitrogen that was collected from Omaha kitchens instead of manufactured, and less of it ends up in the water.

Read more about the farm work

How the composting works

Recognition

Earth Day Omaha 2026 Friend of the Environment Individual Award plaque engraved with Andy Harpenau's name

Friend of the Environment, Individual Award, 2026

From Earth Day Omaha and the Green Omaha Coalition, presented by the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District. The awards date back to 2010.

2026 winners at Green Omaha Coalition

Organics Diversion Program of the Year, 2025

The US Composting Council's national award, given to Soil Dynamics and Hillside Solutions at the council's annual conference in California. Andy accepted it on stage for the whole crew.

USCC award winners

End Market of the Year, 2020 and 2025

The Nebraska Recycling Council's award for the business that turns collected material into something people buy. Soil Dynamics won it first in 2020, and Soil Dynamics with Hillside Solutions won it again in 2025.

2020 winners 2025 winners

From the team, posted on Facebook

The crew wrote this for Andy a while back, without telling him first. We're leaving it as they wrote it.

Can you help us gush on (and embarrass) our boss Andy a bit? He doesn't like getting in front of cameras much, so we didn't tell him we're doing this.

But because of his decades of work, businesses, organizations, and households have a heck of an easier time keeping their trash out of a landfill.

Thanks to him, through Hillside Solutions, there are small businesses and Fortune 500 companies in Omaha that are nailing their sustainability goals through a whole suite of recycling and composting services that no other hauler is single-handedly offering.

He started the Omaha area's first and only industrial composting facility, Soil Dynamics, that has been helping for years to rebuild the soil in our community and keeping hundreds of thousands of tons of perfectly good compostable material out of the landfill. Plus Hillside Fund, a non-profit that's helping advocate for access and education around composting.

With the recent launch of Curbside Compost Club, there are nearly hundreds of homes being picked up every week, and over 1,000 households using our community drop-off service.

And of course the backbone of this whole movement is Gretna Sanitation, which he started with his family to provide a trash, recycling, and yard waste pickup program for thousands of homes outside of the City of Omaha.

All of this work has gotten our companies many awards and recognitions, including one from the US Composting Council that he received in California earlier this year.

But the thing he's most proud of?

It's the work he's doing to help Nebraska farmers transition to more sustainable forms of industrial farming. Lessening use of synthetic fertilizers by using compost collected from Curbside Compost Club. Which will put less cancer-causing nitrates into our water system in the years to come.

There's a whole team of people who grind away every day making this happen, but the glue that holds it all together is Andy.

And for that, we're grateful for his tireless efforts in helping provide a pathway for Nebraska to be more sustainable and responsible with its precious resources.

Thank you, Andy!

In the press

Work with the companies Andy built

Trash, recycling and yard waste at your home: Gretna Sanitation. Recycling, composting and the Compost Club for your business or household: Hillside Solutions. Compost, soil and mulch by the yard, or a place to drop off yard and tree waste: you're already here.

Soil Dynamics is the composting arm of the same locally owned team as Gretna Sanitation and Hillside Solutions. How the three fit together.