From Carlton Kitchen Scraps to a $2M Business: How One Melbourne Entrepreneur Is Rewriting the Circular Economy Playbook

LoopBack Organics, a five-year-old company headquartered on Lygon Street in Carlton, hit $2 million in annual revenue last financial year and is now employing 34 full-time staff — up from nine in mid-2024. The company collects food scraps from more than 280 Melbourne restaurants, processes them at a facility in Campbellfield, and sells the resulting compost and liquid fertiliser back to market gardeners in the Yarra Valley and Mornington Peninsula.

The timing matters. Melbourne's unemployment rate edged up to 4.3 per cent in the June quarter, according to figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, even as Victoria's broader economy kept growing. The state government's green economy ambitions — anchored by the Victorian Jobs and Industry Roadmap released in March 2026 — are producing uneven results across sectors. Big infrastructure projects and AI data centre developments are competing fiercely for industrial land in the city's north and west, squeezing out smaller operators. Against that backdrop, LoopBack's growth looks like a genuine anomaly.

Building a workforce in the waste gap

The company's founder, who started the business in 2021 after a decade running a catering operation out of South Melbourne Market, identified a structural gap almost nobody else had touched. Hospitality venues were paying $180 to $220 per month to have food waste hauled away by conventional contractors. LoopBack charges $95 per month, subsidised by the revenue from compost sales, which now fetch around $340 per tonne from agricultural buyers. The model only works at scale, which is why the Campbellfield processing site — a converted cold-storage warehouse on Hume Highway — now runs two shifts, six days a week.

Fourteen of LoopBack's 34 employees came directly from Melbourne's hospitality sector, which shed roughly 6,200 jobs across metropolitan Melbourne between October 2024 and April 2026 as the post-COVID dining boom finally deflated. Several others were referred through the Brotherhood of St Laurence's Work and Learning Centres program, which operates sites in Fitzroy and Frankston. The company has also partnered with RMIT University's sustainability engineering program in the CBD to take on two paid interns per semester.

The Campbellfield site processes roughly 18 tonnes of organic material per week. That number is expected to climb to 30 tonnes by December after a $480,000 capital injection from the state government's Circular Economy Business Innovation Fund, announced in May 2026. The funding covers a second composting drum and upgraded liquid-extraction equipment.

What the model points to for Melbourne's job market

LoopBack is not the only player in this space — Reground, which processes coffee grounds, operates out of Collingwood, and several farm-to-waste operators have been active in the western suburbs for years. But the company's staffing approach is getting attention from economic development officers at the City of Melbourne and Merri-bek councils, who are tracking it as a case study in what officials are quietly calling "transitional employment" — pathways for workers leaving contracting industries into emerging green-economy roles.

Pay rates at LoopBack start at $28.50 per hour for processing-floor roles, above the current national minimum wage of $24.10. The company offers a $1,500 annual professional development allowance and has enrolled seven staff members in Certificate III in Waste Management through Chisholm Institute since January.

For other small business owners watching the circular economy space, LoopBack's trajectory suggests a few practical realities. Margins depend entirely on volume — the unit economics don't work below roughly 150 venue clients. Municipal contracts are a safer foundation than purely commercial ones; LoopBack secured a pilot agreement with Yarra City Council in February worth $68,000 annually. And the workforce pool inside hospitality is large, skilled, and largely overlooked by green-economy recruiters who tend to focus on trade and construction backgrounds.

LoopBack is currently advertising three logistics coordinator roles on its website, with applications closing July 18. The company expects to open a second processing site — likely in Dandenong or Braeside — before the end of the 2026 calendar year, which would push its headcount past 50.