I've lived in a few places that have started them up as commercial operations. By far the biggest objections are smell. A commercial scale operation requires very good management and proper equipment to deal with such issues, and it's not necessarily cheap. This may mean acquiring the right mix of additional materials to ensure proper composting - i.e. waste from most households will be heavy on greens and need browns (wood chips etc), and the mix varies by season. Household compostable waste will also tend to include things like meat, dairy, prepared foods, etc, that are harder to compost without smells and other issues. Municipal composting also need sorting facilities to 'weed out' stuff like plastics that inevitably get in there. Separate colleciton is also not cheap.

Does your town have a facility for composting yard waste (including branches and whatnot from city facilities)? It may be worth considering starting with something like that - yard waste composting is far easier to manage, predictable, and with far less of the problems and unpredictability of other compostable household waste. Avoiding landfilling yard waste is already a win.

That said, I'm all for it, but don't underestimate how hard it is to do right. It's not a project for volunteers at the weekend.

A friend's (who I met here, by the way) partner started this program. https://www.bethelmaine.org/2272/New-Composting-Program-Guidelines

It's not clear to me whether the intent is to teach how to compost at home (which) would be much easier) or to start a town wide program which would be much more complicated.

I would debate several of the items in the "NO" column in the link provided above. But that would surely derail this thread.

The way it worked in my town is they signed a contract with a UC Davis guy who knew what he was doing with the right equipment.

He was responsible for hustling the 'greens' and the city gave him access to their mountain of wood chips. Davis guy sold the compost from the city's leading nursery. The mountain of wood chips is a small hill and now he has competition.

There are entire organizations and journals devoted to such questions. Check out Biocycle magazine and the American Composting Council for starters.

Your state will most likely have regulations concerning any operation that brings in material from elsewhere to compost and then sending out the product - i.e. an industrial composting operation rather than a farmer or gardener feeding his own soil. Permits are usually required controlling things like odor, pests, stormwater runoff, etc. There may also be local zoning regulations governing where you can put such an operation.

None of this is meant to discourage you from doing it! Just giving you a few parameters to work with. Most likely the state would have some resources and info to help you get something like this started.

USCCC page on NJ Regulations: https://compostingcouncil.org/state-compost-regulations-map/#nj

Recycling NJ Page: Includes a lot of links to local resources.

http://www.recyclingnj.com/index.html

thanks for the suggestions, feed-back and links.

Particularly the one to NJ Recycling page.

My vision is actually very much smaller than ones proposed here. I have since learned that there is a guy in town who already picks up compost with his bicycle. I will meet with him. that is more what I have in mind. If the city would provide a space that can be fenced and locked, and people would buy into a membership program to use the service. That way we can control what goes in. This is what they have in Austin. https://compostpedallers.com/ 

https://www.growingagreenerworld.com/episode-811-compost-pedallers/