Heather has more than 20 years of experience working in Florida’s coastal and rural communities from Amelia Island to Key West, Saint Augustine to Cedar Key. She is committed to making great places for residents and businesses and finding strategic paths for infrastructure to make those happen.

As a lifetime entrepreneur who has worked in public and private development, she has a unique set of career experiences that provide clients with an open-minded strategy to leverage local assets with federal objectives and creative funding strategies to build projects. She is currently contracted with Indianhead Explorations/Indianhead Biomass performing compliance, communication, and expansion strategies. Her efforts have assisted the site with contracts, business partnerships, government relationships, CFR compliance, and community needs. She is also the business development officer for Darn Good Dirt, a retail compost brand. The brand is focused on bringing compost into everyday life including house plants, countertop and urban composting, and other residential uses. Additionally, she is wrapping a research paper called “”Let me FLOAT (Funding And Logistics, Ocean, Assets, and Transportation) Something By You”” documenting her experience over the past year observing the transportation of goods, services, and waste in the Caribbean from the Bahamas to the Virgin Islands. The research inspired a pilot program aimed at understanding how waste can be converted into materials and support hyper-local economies.

Session Code: 5D

Track: Florida

Session Name: State of Composting in Florida

Session Time: Thursday, February 8, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM

Presentation Title: “Won’t you be my neighbor?” One Company’s strategy to be part of the solution, bring the community along, and ensure the successful future of compost in Florida

Presentation Description: The compost industry’s success is reliant on its biggest issue, population growth. After 5 years of producing compost in St. Augustine, Florida, Indianhead is tackling the issue three fold through a pilot program targeted to help manage the issues facing our success as a full cycle solution to urban issues of yard and human waste. The Good Neighbor Pilot Program (GNPP) combines education and communication campaigns, executing abatement projects, and assisting our local leadership in policies that assist this issue.

As Florida’s population continues to see staggering growth in population, previously rural areas are quickly becoming developed and suburbanized. This migration creates more waste and less space. More waste serves as an opportunity for composters like us but comes at the cost of more odor complaints and nuisance issues with newly constructed neighborhoods and a general lack of understanding by many of where their waste must go.

At Indianhead, we’ve developed a few different initiatives and want to share our success, failures, area leadership partners, and path to help our industry thrive. We believe by educating locals about compost and the life cycle of waste, and having the community involved in composting and conservation efforts, we can solve larger scale issues and have success as businesses.

Our presentation will focus on the origin story of Indianhead, our experience encountering the challenges of a growing compost operation, and how we’ve turned those challenges into the opportunity to be a respected member of our community. We are excited to bring our local team, area officials, and consultant team.