Tangerine Organics | The organic waste marketplace for New York

The problem

Why organic waste continues to end up in landfills

New York already has the composting facilities, anaerobic digesters and food recovery networks needed to put organic waste to productive use. What the state lacks is an efficient market connecting the businesses that generate this waste with haulers and processors who are ready to receive it.

Food waste is responsible for 58% of all landfill methane emissions, a greenhouse gas over 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Today, businesses default to landfilling because finding alternatives requires hours of manual phone calls, tedious multi-party coordination conducted through paper invoicing, and complex planning and organization.

By removing these operational barriers, Tangerine prevents tons of organic waste from entering landfills, directly reducing methane emissions and accelerating the transition to a regional circular economy.

Waste generators cannot see who wants their waste

Food businesses and farms rarely know which haulers or processing facilities nearby will accept their organic waste, or that many of their byproducts hold real value for other businesses. Because finding an alternative requires hours of research and calls, most generators default to the landfill, often in violation of state law. In New York City, this lack of visibility runs in both directions, as no public list yet exists of the businesses that the city's organics requirements will cover.

Coordination depends on phone calls and paper receipts

Moving a single load of organic waste requires coordination between the generator, the hauler and the processing facility, each of which relies on its own disconnected system. Pickups are arranged through phone calls and emails, loads are recorded only on paper weight slips, and staff must manually enter those figures into spreadsheets and invoicing software every month. This tedious process consumes valuable time, creates costly errors and makes annual compliance reporting far more difficult than it needs to be.

Processing capacity sits unused while contamination reduces yield

Composters and anaerobic digesters across the state regularly operate below their permitted capacity, because feedstock arrives unpredictably from a limited number of nearby sources and very few haulers offer organic collection. When loads arrive mixed with plastic packaging, cardboard or fruit stickers, facilities are forced to either reject the material at the gate or spend significant staff time removing contaminants by hand.

The solution

How Tangerine connects the organic waste supply chain

Tangerine is a B2B waste marketplace that replaces outdated phone calls and paper-receipt transactions with an automated network, matching waste generators directly with available haulers and processing facilities based on location, volume and waste type. By streamlining communication, logistics dispatch and digital data tracking, Tangerine makes routing organic waste to high-value uses faster, cheaper and more reliable than landfilling.

Waste generators

Restaurants, grocers, food manufacturers, institutions and farms tell us once what organic waste they produce, how much and how often, and Tangerine plans their pickups with nearby haulers and processing facilities that accept that material. Generators save hours of coordination, get one schedule and one bill, and keep a complete digital record of every pickup for compliance reporting.

Haulers

Haulers gain access to available loads along and near their existing routes, allowing them to fill gaps in their schedules and move more material for every mile driven. Weights and delivery confirmations are recorded directly in the app at pickup, and payments are processed through the platform, eliminating the back-and-forth of paper slips and invoices.

Processing facilities

Composters, anaerobic digesters and upcycling businesses publish the materials they accept and their available intake capacity, securing a steady supply of feedstock from across the region. Facilities can see incoming loads before trucks arrive, and we track the quality of material from each supplier over time.

Two data layers working together

Layer 1

The marketplace and data layer

Tangerine matches generators, haulers and processors by location, volume and waste type, and manages dispatch, delivery confirmation and payment within a single platform. Because every transaction is recorded, Tangerine also builds a live picture of how much organic waste is produced across the region, where it travels and where processing capacity remains available. This gives regulators, nonprofits and investors the data they need to track diversion rates and plan new infrastructure.

Generators list waste streams as they are produced and maintain a digital record for compliance.
Haulers view and accept nearby loads and follow routes designed to carry more material per mile.
Processing facilities publish live intake capacity and source feedstock from across the region.
Regulators, nonprofits and investors monitor diversion rates and gaps in processing capacity in real time.

Layer 2

AI vision contamination screening

As the platform grows, Tangerine will install camera systems at the points where waste is first loaded and where it is transferred to trucks and facilities. These systems use computer vision models trained on organic waste to identify plastic packaging and other contaminants before a load leaves the site. This reduces rejected loads, protects processing facilities from contaminated feedstock and keeps the platform's data accurate without adding work for generators.

Detection models are trained specifically on organic waste streams and common packaging contaminants.
Contamination is flagged at the loading dock before a load ships, rather than after it is rejected at the gate.
Load composition is recorded automatically for processing facilities and compliance records.
The system builds on our team's experience running computer vision pipelines in commercial agricultural settings.

How Tangerine is different

Existing software addresses only isolated fragments of the organic waste supply chain. ChipDrop helps tree services deliver surplus wood chips, ShareWaste connects households with neighbors who compost, and large waste companies operate closed networks built around their own routes and facilities. As a result, most small and mid-sized haulers and processors still manage their operations through spreadsheets, phone calls and general accounting software. None of these tools solve the core pain point we heard repeatedly from stakeholders across New York: the absence of a centralized, automated system for matching organic waste with the right hauler and processor. Tangerine is the first open, multi-sided marketplace built to digitize this entire workflow, automating buyer and seller matching, hauler dispatch and data intake, and turning fragmented paper-based waste transfers into a single digital transaction.

Product

One platform built around the way you work

When you sign up, you tell Tangerine what your organization does: produce organic waste, haul it, process it, or any combination. Tangerine then shows you only what you need, whether that's your pickup schedule, your routes or your incoming deliveries, along with the records for each.

Generator

See upcoming pickups and log your organic waste with ease, keep track of compliance deadlines and connect with haulers or buyers in your area.

Hauler

Get weekly routes planned to cut empty miles, and confirm each pickup with a tap instead of a paper receipt.

Processor

See each week's incoming deliveries, where they come from and when they'll arrive, track the quality of material from each supplier over time, and keep records for state reporting.

Why now

Why the timing is right for Tangerine

Tightening regulation is bringing thousands more businesses into scope.

Under New York State's Food Donation and Food Scraps Recycling Law, businesses generating 2 tons or more of food scraps per week must currently divert them if an organics recycler is located within 25 miles. On January 1, 2027, that threshold drops to 1 ton per week and the distance expands to 50 miles, before falling again to 0.5 tons per week on January 1, 2029.

New York City is exempt from the state law and follows its own track under Local Law 146, modernized by Int. 31 in July 2026. The Department of Sanitation must determine by December 1, 2026 whether the city has sufficient processing capacity at competitive prices. If it does, newly designated businesses will have six months to comply. Unlike the state, the city does not yet publish which businesses will be covered, which is exactly the visibility gap Tangerine's data layer is designed to fill.

Processing facilities need reliable supply to meet the state's climate goals.

Under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, New York has committed to 70% renewable electricity by 2030. Yet anaerobic digesters and composters across the state, from livestock digesters upstate to WM's Varick Avenue depackaging facility in Brooklyn, continue to operate below capacity because they lack visibility into nearby supply. Connecting this idle capacity with newly regulated businesses solves both sides of the same market failure.

AI vision technology is now affordable and deployable.

Five years ago, classifying mixed industrial material streams with cameras was still a research problem. Today it runs on affordable commodity hardware, and our team has already deployed a production vision pipeline in commercial livestock environments. Tangerine applies the same proven approach to organic waste and packaging contamination.

About us

Why we are building Tangerine

We met at a climate hackathon at the Climate Imaginarium on Governors Island and quickly discovered a shared conviction: the climate transition depends on working markets just as much as it depends on new technology. New York already has the infrastructure to turn food scraps and manure into compost and renewable energy, but that infrastructure remains disconnected from the businesses that generate the waste. We built Tangerine to close that gap.

Our mission

Our mission is to support the diversion of organic waste from landfills by removing the operational barriers that keep businesses from recycling it, directly reducing landfill methane emissions and accelerating New York's transition to a circular economy.

Zoe Liu

Co-founder and CEO

Zoe is completing her master's degree in Environmental Science and Policy at Columbia University, specializing in waste-to-energy research and policy. She has written research papers based on international fieldwork analyzing agribusiness supply chains. She previously founded a social impact startup through Boston College's Start@Shea accelerator, where she secured non-dilutive seed funding and led operations, budgeting, marketing, partnerships and creative direction. With an undergraduate background in communications, Zoe leads Tangerine's overall strategy, business development, regulatory policy analysis, investor relations and customer discovery.

Tristan Spratt

Co-founder and CTO

Tristan is a founding engineer at Prophet AI, a Greentown Labs agritech startup that uses computer vision to monitor poultry health and prevent 2 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions annually. He built the company's entire vision pipeline, including camera installation, annotation and training infrastructure, edge deployment, and the dashboards used by two of the largest poultry producers in the United States. As an undergraduate, he took part in the Tufts Venture Accelerator, where he built a non-invasive neurostimulation wearable designed to help people fall asleep. Tristan leads Tangerine's technical product architecture, platform development and data pipeline design.

Tangerine connects New York's organic waste producers with the haulers and processing facilities that can use it.