SEEN’s 4th Annual Women’s Issue: Pashon Murray, Founder of Detroit Dirt

Pashon Murray, founder of Detroit Dirt, is turning trash into treasure — and helping save the planet in the process By Nicole Frehsee Mazur Photography by Erin Kirkland Growing up in Grand Rapids, Pashon Murray often accompanied her father, who owned a contracting business, on work errands. His job involved waste management, and the pair would make frequent stops at nearby landfills — which Murray found problematic, even as a kid. “The landfills didn’t make any sense to me,” she recalls. “I was asking myself at a young age, ‘Are we just going to keep burying things?’” Today, Murray, who’s in her early 40s, is providing a solution to that question. In 2010 she co-founded Detroit Dirt, which gathers food waste from local restaurants, businesses like General Motors and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, and the Detroit Zoo (where there’s lots of manure from plant-eating animals) and transforms it into compost — decomposed organic matter that’s rich in nutrients and other organisms that help the growing process. Detroit Dirt has a multi-pronged mission: to divert waste from landfills and provide quality soil, crucial for growing good produce, to local farmers and gardeners, who then provide their communities with healthy […]