
February 3, 2025
STEVENS POINT – According to a study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Americans produce an estimated 60 million tons of food waste every year.
Kelly Adlington – owner of Bucket Ruckus, an organic material collection and composting service in Stevens Point – said food waste makes up 22% of the waste that ends up in landfills.
It’s material that Adlington said could otherwise be used to make compost – an all-natural and healthy soil amendment that can be used for gardening, horticulture, agriculture, landscaping and urban agriculture.
Adlington said Bucket Ruckus is a community composter, which means the material it collects is made into the compost product and in turn used in the same community from which the feedstocks come.
“That’s really important because we’re keeping the resource locally,” she said. “It’s a very valuable soil amendment to the sandy soils generally found in Central Wisconsin.”
Though she has done some form of composting since 2018, Adlington said she didn’t officially start Bucket Ruckus until three years ago.
In that time, she said Bucket Ruckus has diverted more than a half-million pounds of organic material from landfill disposal.
The greenhouse footprint saved, Adlington said, is large enough to make a massive difference.
When she decided to start Bucket Ruckus, Adlington said coming up with the name was difficult.
However, one day she said her partner said the phrase – Bucket Ruckus, and it seemed to stick.
After all, Adlington said, buckets are part of the company’s toolset and they’re utilizing an “unconventional” method to cause a ruckus.
Though she has started to see an increasing interest in it, Adlington said she hopes to normalize composting and organic diversion by creating another option.
Education is an essential element
Adlington said another aspect of being a community composter is being an educator on the topic.
Composting, she said, is an aerobic process, meaning oxygen is required for the food scraps to break down properly.
Adlington said the uses of compost include: building healthier soil, preventing soil erosion, conserving water and improving plant growth in gardens and yards.
On the flipside, when waste goes to a landfill for disposal, she said they break down anaerobically, or without oxygen.
Furthermore, Adlington said the landfill environment is made to contain all the materials that go in, getting covered every day with more and more waste.

When food scraps break down without oxygen, the chemical reaction yields methane, which she said is 30 times more impactful than carbon dioxide in terms of its effects on the environment and climate change.
“That’s a big part of what we want to have an impact on,” she said. “Not just removing it from the conventional waste stream, but also promoting a way to turn food waste into a value-added product that has a renewable impact on the environment and community.”
To help reduce its own greenhouse gas footprint, Adlington said Bucket Ruckus works with Curbwise LLC, a bicycle-powered delivery and distribution service in Stevens Point, to help with bucket collection.
To help share her composting knowledge with her community, Adlington said her goal is to reach out to the demographics who may not understand how they can help with a simple solution like Bucket Ruckus.
This, she said, includes hosting a free informational community event April 5 at Bucket Ruckus’ warehouse (2041 Madison St.) that features various presenters talking about natural resource topics, games for kids and adults and a display of how much food actually goes to waste over the course of just a couple weeks.
Common misconceptions
Adlington said once clients sign up for Bucket Ruckus services, that’s when they realize how much food scrap material they actually generate.
“A lot of people think they don’t make enough for it to be worthwhile,” she said. “I understand that that’s looking at it from an economic perspective, but the reality is that any amount of food scrap is enough. It’s all exponential.”
Adlington said according to a statewide audit done by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources on what was thrown away and what ends up in landfills from homes, businesses and institutions, they found that almost a third of what goes into the landfill could be composted.
At the end of the day, Adlington said whether someone is home-composting or using a service to compost, it makes a difference, and she’s always willing to answer questions.
Services
Adlington said Bucket Ruckus offers both residential and commercial pick-up services within the Stevens Point and Plover areas.
For residential customers, she said they utilize a five-gallon Bucket Ruckus bucket that is picked up weekly or every other week depending on preferences.
Keeping to the idea of reduce, reuse, recycle, Adlington said she sources all Bucket Ruckus’ residential buckets used, which is something she is very proud of.
For the commercial customers, Adlington said they receive a 32-gallon container, and a couple of buckets for back-of-house collection to dump into the larger bins.
The waste Bucket Ruckus collects, Adlington said, includes all types of food scraps, such as: meat products (plus bones and fat trimmings), dairy, oily foods, cooked foods and processed foods.
If it’s food, she said, they’ll take it.
On a non-food side, Adlington said Bucket Ruckus also accepts used paper napkins, tissues and tea bags in their buckets, too.
She said many people are surprised by how much is truly compostable.
“If it’s a product that came from the ground – whether that’s a stem on a plant or an animal – that’s material that can be broken down and put back into the earth,” she said. “It’s something that people notice in their day-to-day lives when they don’t have to put that stuff in their garbage bin.”
Adlington said the community response to Bucket Ruckus has been excellent – noting that once people start using its services they tend to keep it.
She’s noticed a culture shift around this kind of service and the need to pay for it as well.
Growth in business, utilizing new ideas
Bucket Ruckus’ growth, Adlington said, has been slow and steady – with the last few months seeing an uptick in sign-ups.
As 2025 begins to take shape, Adlington said they’ll be collecting food scraps from an elementary school in Plover again.
From September 2019 to March 2020, she said she was collecting from a junior high and elementary school in Plover and is happy to have the elementary school back on the list of pickups.
“I think this is a tremendous opportunity to bring it to the classroom,” she said. “I have this idea of working with a science teacher on certain lessons about decomposition and roping composting into that. This could inspire the kids to bring that method home.”

As a result of understanding the science and benefits of composting being a multifaceted solution for a multifaceted problem, Adlington said she has also been able to use her knowledge to help with the Avian Flu outbreak.
Her efforts over the last three years, she said, have supported Bucket Ruckus’ growth from a small community composter collecting 3,000 pounds a week to seeing compost being implemented as a federal emergency response.
“I like juxtaposing the two things,” she said. “Sure, community composting can be a warm, fuzzy, altruistic thing, but then at the same time it can be a legitimate solution to a national crisis.”
What happens with the compost?
Adlington said much of the “finished product” goes back to Whitefeather Organics, located in Custer, who Bucket Ruckus partners with for hosting the compost site.
She said Bucket Ruckus does all the pile maintenance, from turning piles, taking temperatures, visual observations and more.
Some of the finished product, Adlington said, has also been sold to Giving Gardens, an organization in Portage County that has community gardens dispersed.
She said it’s a great thing to be able to see finished compost back in community gardens that people grew food in initially.
Adlington said though she’d love for Bucket Ruckus to be able to sell more of the compost directly to the community, she would need to invest in equipment, like a screener to remove large wood chunks and other debris in the compost, as that’s not always good for certain types of crops and usability.
It could be something for the future, she said.
More recently, Adlington said she has also dabbled in worm composting, which is definitely on a smaller scale and is a little easier to control.
This project, she said, is somewhat in “research and development” while she and her partner, Asher, figure out how, or if, they’ll be able to add it as a compost product, in a specialty blend of sorts.
When asked what the best part of the job is, Adlington said she thinks of the days when she breaks into a compost pile at the farm site, the warm steam and the smell of a greenhouse.
“Getting dirt under my fingernails, and thinking about the springtime and growing plants, these cycles that we live with are really rewarding,” she said. “I look forward to that every year.”
More details on Bucket Ruckus are available at bucketruckus.cc.