Their waste falls below the threshold required under the food waste ban, but Home.stead co-owner Vivian Girard says reducing waste and composting are important to him and his wife/business partner, Elisa, who live also in the historic Dorchester neighborhood.

“We’re small, but it’s a meaningful amount,” Girard says.

“Spaces like this are really important,” Gaul notes. “Your staff is directly participating in this culture.”

“We’re trying to think a little beyond the cash register,” Girard adds.

Gaul hopes that a wider swath of businesses will come to share this commitment to the environment and thinking about the future.

“I want to popularize sustainability. I want to popularize recycling,” she says.

There are signs that word is getting out. Gaul notes that when she joined CERO in 2015, only a few potential clients contacted her via the website. Most of her work was reaching out to companies to make them aware of the advantages of using a composting service. (The advantages are both environmental and financial. Composting services generally cost less than sending waste to the landfill.) Now, as many as 10 businesses a week contact CERO to find out about composting.

“I think it has to do with the attention that climate change is getting right now as a topic. People are realizing how much our world is changing,” Gaul says.

A desire to help make change happen and be part of something bigger is what brought Gaul to CERO from her previous job at WGBH. Gaul grew up in Egleston Square and wanted to return to Boston after graduating from college. She was working on public relations for a documentary on the Civil Rights movement when she realized that she wanted to be part of making change, not writing about it.

“I thought, ‘Maybe there’s something I can be doing that’s more pressing to frontline issues,’” Gaul remembers. In 2015, a business acquaintance introduced Gaul to Luna. CERO was looking for someone to head up sales and join the co-op as an owner-worker. Gaul decided it was just the sort of frontline opportunity she was looking for. Soon she found herself a part of a small organization with a big mandate. Under CERO’s unique co-op structure, she learned what it meant to be both an owner and worker.

“When I first started, we were so strapped that I was on the trucks. I was cleaning the totes. I was doing all that, and just the act of it was very humbling. But also, I realized what goes into the operations here, how much care we put into it, how much thought goes into that. I think a lot of our clients, they put that same level of detail and care into their own operations,” Gaul says.

Gaul and Luna are among the three current employee-owners of the firm. There are also two emeritus owners and three people on track to become owners. Employees from throughout the company are able to move into an owner track in the small, tight-knit organization.

“We’re not just a business and we’re not a family, but we’re a cooperative business. And that’s very interesting, but also very challenging,” Gaul says. She notes that taking on the challenges of running a business doesn’t appeal to everyone. Some workers decide to move on rather than pursuing ownership. According to Gaul, everyone at the company—owner or not—is paid the same modest salary. She has heard back from some colleagues who have moved on to other jobs saying, “Oh, I didn’t understand the culture of dignity here.”

With its recycling business established and growing, CERO has set its sights next on something bigger: a cooperatively owned facility that generates green energy in Boston. CERO recently submitted a proposal to the Commonwealth to develop the former Boston State Hospital parcel as an anaerobic digester that will convert food into renewable energy in the form of natural gas and electricity. CERO’s proposal is one of several now being considered by the state.

Gaul sees a highly visible green project like this as one more step on the way to meaningful changes in the community, and beyond. “To me it’s like an echo of the soul. You see these things and you say, ‘This is what I should be doing.’”

cero.coop

This story appeared in the Winter 2020 issue.