10 March 2026
Full Sun Compost, the pickup service that since the fall of 2024 has been urgently hunting for a new home, has moved into a new complex in Wells Park that promises to help expand its roster of commercial clients.
The new one-acre location is a former scrapyard at the northeast corner of Fifth and Haines and features two buildings that add up to 7,500 square feet. One is a Quonset hut and the other is a combination garage with attached offices that until recent weeks had only an off-grid solar system for electric power. Outside, workers have installed a series of compost piles where wood chips are mixed with incoming food waste at a ratio of about five to one.
At the soft opening in late January, spirits were high among the group of friends and investors taking tours of the new place, coffee and burritos in hand.
“There are beautiful, amazing things happening here, and it’s really exciting,” owner Brad Weikel told the crowd.
There was also a palpable sense of relief. For Full Sun Compost (née Little Green Bucket), the property represents the end of a long and sometime harrowing journey that began in the fall of 2024, when the relationship it had with its composting processor – the name of which it has not disclosed – came to an abrupt end (DAN, 06/05/2025).
Convinced that the only sensible way forward involved bringing the compost processing in-house, Weikel kicked off a crowdsourced fundraising round, recruited a few farmers to take delivery of food waste as a stopgap, and set about looking for a new home. The ideal, best-of-all-worlds scenario would have involved a few acres – room that would have been devoted to ramping up the commercial pickup service, which involves much higher volumes than the residential side, and launching a series of other new business components that would have combined into what Weikel called a “community-centered sustainability hub.”
The real estate gods instead delivered a one-acre parcel, which put limits on the broader vision. Commercial growth “depends entirely on how efficiently we can use the space and how quickly we can produce mature, garden-ready compost,” Weikel said. “We’ll feel it out over time.”
Most of the side businesses are also going to be put on hold, at least for the time being.
“Instead of a commercial greenhouse, nursery, and demonstration farm, we’ll have a few demonstration raised beds and a small farm and garden shop,” Weikel said. “We won’t be raising chickens on food waste and black soldier flies. We’re unlikely to launch a tool lending library or a center for hard-to-recycle materials. Our plastic recycling efforts will remain pretty limited.”
Founded in West Old Town in 2018 and incubated by a customer base that in the early days was concentrated around Greater Old Town, Little Green Bucket spent most of its subsequent years operating out of a building at Twelfth and Granite, where it became locally famous for an annual post-Halloween pumpkin composting service. It scaled up over time, adding commercial service under the Full Sun brand. It now counts 10 employees – 12 if you count Weikel’s kids, who do odd jobs when not in school.
The building at Twelfth and Granite will return to the rental market, Weikel said.
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