Brian Somers jabbed a gloved hand into a clear trash bag and fished out a metal tube. He tossed the bag into his truck, set the tube aside and sent a text to the South Burlington homeowner: Next time, separate metal from trash — it goes to a scrapyard, not the landfill.
“It’s hard,” Somers told a reporter tagging along on his afternoon trash route one recent Thursday. “I don’t know how we could expect everybody to know where absolutely everything goes.”
Somers, 34, isn’t your typical trash hauler. For starters, he co-owns the Chittenden County business, Curb Resource Collection. And when’s the last time your garbageman texted you with advice?
That hands-on approach is central to Curb’s mission: helping Vermonters become more thoughtful about what they throw away. Beyond Somers’ gentle reminders about proper sorting, an environmental ethos is baked into Curb’s pricing model. The business offers compost and recycling pickup for a monthly flat fee — $54 for weekly or $36 for biweekly service — while landfill-bound trash costs $3 per bag. The idea is that unit pricing will make people more mindful of their waste and maybe, as a result, throw less away.
“It does provide some psychological effect, just being mindful of each bag,” said Ryan Gonzales, a customer in South Burlington. Since using Curb, he said, he’s been composting more and disposing of less trash.
Two married couples — Somers and Anna Stuart, and Kristen and Tommy Lyga — started Curb in 2022. The four met as college students in Burlington, Stuart at the University of Vermont and the rest at Champlain College. They kept in touch after graduation, and get-togethers that started as game nights playing Catan soon morphed into strategy sessions for a real-life venture.
“It’s unique, having a connection with your trash guy.” Ryan Gonzales
Today, Curb is a profitable business with hundreds of customers. Somers is employed by the company full time, driving the sole black Curb truck. For the others, it’s a part-time gig. By day, Stuart works as a cybersecurity lawyer, Kristen as a real estate agent and Tommy as a commercial account manager at Vermont Construction.
Somers is the waste whiz of the bunch. After studying business at Champlain, he went to work for Green Mountain Compost, which was later absorbed by Chittenden Solid Waste District. In 2015, he moved on, first working as a scale operator weighing inbound trash for a waste management company near Boston and later as a sales representative for a similar company in New York City.
Those roles inspired Somers to look more closely at the waste management industry, which is a complex patchwork of private companies and municipal programs depending on the area. In Vermont, waste collection is generally handled by private haulers — though Burlington has mandatory municipal recycling.
Somers noticed that the “pay-as-you-throw” pricing model was gaining traction. In 2022, more than 7,000 U.S. cities and towns charged for trash by the bag, including Seattle and Portland, Maine. The results were significant. The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection found that towns with pay-as-you-throw systems generated an average of 30 percent less trash per household in 2020, compared with households in towns that didn’t use that approach.
Curb set out to bring that model to environmentally conscious Vermont. While most local waste collectors charge a flat fee based on bin size — regardless of how much trash a customer actually sets out — Curb takes a different approach. Customers buy $3 stickers to attach to each trash bag, paying only for what they throw away.
More discrete pricing was part of the appeal for Burlington resident Becky Wilkins, who signed up for Curb when she bought her house last June. Her household of five only generates about one 15-gallon trash bag each week — a result of thoughtful consumption, composting, recycling and feeding food scraps to her backyard chickens.
“I really didn’t want to be paying the full price for regular curbside pickup when I don’t need that much trash pickup,” she said. “I really liked [Curb’s] payment structure and their whole philosophy.”
Curb also distinguishes itself from larger haulers with responsive customer service — its employees answer the phone — and flexible scheduling. Customers who don’t have trash some weeks can pause service and earn a $4 credit.
Somers also takes pride in educating customers, and he’ll send them a message if something’s off. Some frequent offenders: In Vermont, greasy pizza boxes can be recycled. Styrofoam cannot.
Somers builds rapport with customers, too. Gonzales, who works from home, often chats with him during pickups.
“It’s unique, having a connection with your trash guy,” Gonzales said. “I have his cellphone number!”
Yet being a hyperlocal waste collection company also has its challenges. Curb’s biggest competitor, Casella Waste Systems, is a publicly traded company with 4,000 employees compared with Curb’s four.
Rather than convincing people to switch waste collectors, Curb sees the most success with new homeowners. The business doesn’t invest much in advertising, instead relying on word of mouth and the visibility of its distinctive black trash bins.
Still, Somers often drives past clusters of Casella bins just to reach a few Curb customers, making his routes less fuel-efficient. The business is working to increase density on its four routes across Chittenden County, with hopes of adding a second truck and driver soon.
Even disposal happens on Casella turf. After finishing pickups that Thursday, Somers pulled into the Casella Transfer Station in Williston, weighed in, dumped the trash and weighed the truck again. He’d unloaded 1,500 pounds of garbage collected from 67 homes. Birds circled the mountains of trash, the air thick with the stench of rot. From there, the trash would be trucked to Vermont’s only landfill, in Coventry.
Next up, it was time to unload compost at the Chittenden Solid Waste District Drop-Off Center in Williston. Somers hoisted bins out of the truck and dumped 60 gallons into a growing pile of eggshells, citrus peels, half-eaten grapes, and squishy chunks of tomatoes and onions.
Somers took a big swig of water as he climbed back into the truck. He was done for now, but he’d be back on the road on Tuesday — compost and trash day in Burlington.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Trash Talk | Meet Curb, the waste collection startup helping Vermonters think twice before they toss”
Related Stories
This article appears in Nest — Spring 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
