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Waste Reduction Success Stories - Restaurants & Food Waste
More and more businesses are implementing cost saving, environmentally friendly recycling, composting and waste reduction programs. Here are a few restaurants in Cuyahoga County and around the country, who are leading the way.
- Appetite Deli and Bakery
- Great Lakes Brewing Company
- Food waste composting
Appetite Deli & Bakery
Bennett and William Davis run Appetite, a small bakery, deli, and catering facility in Lyndhurst, Ohio. Their waste removal company recently implemented a program to recycle cardboard, paper, plastic, glass and cans. These commodities are typical of restaurant “trash." Appetite switched from a 6 yard trash dumpster to a 4 yard container, and they anticipate throwing away less and less as customers get used to recycling. But Bennett and William are not just happy with their own business recycling; they are encouraging their neighboring businesses to use their recycling dumpster as well.
Appetite donates leftover pastries and breads to homeless shelters and charitable organizations. A local farm takes coffee grounds and food scraps, helping the farm develop nutrient rich compost and preventing methane from forming in landfills. This is a perfect illustration of the proper way to recover food: first - reduce waste, second - feed people, third - feed animals, forth - compost.
Appetite’s owners are glad to see more and more restaurants recycling cardboard, paper, cans and plastic and composting coffee grounds and food scraps. For more information, please see: www.appetitedeliandbakery.com Bon Appetite!
Great Lakes Brewing Company
Long known as a cool Ohio City restaurant, the Great Lakes Brewing Company (GLBC) is also a leader in waste reduction and recycling. Here are just some of the sustainability initiatives at GLBC.
GLBC operates a beer delivery truck and a shuttle bus called "The Fatty Wagon" that runs on straight restaurant vegetable oil. Results show that engines running on straight vegetable oil produce 40% less soot than diesel and are 25% cleaner. If not used as fuel, this vegetable oil would have to be picked up by a cooking oil recycler.
Zoss the Swiss Baker produces the cracked barley beer bread and pretzels found on the menu using grains from the brewing process.
GLBC recycles cardboard, glass, plastic, steel/aluminum, paper and brewer’s barley to reduce trash removal fees by over 50%. GLBC prints newsletters, menus, beverage napkins and promotional items on 100% recycled paper. In addition, all packaging (i.e., 4-packs, 6-packs, 12-packs and the unbleached "eco-carton", which holds a case of beer) consists of recycled content.
GLBC uses vermicomposting to produce natural fertilizer. A portion of paper, kitchen scraps, grain and cardboard is fed to worms, which then produce castings - top-of-the-line organic fertilizer - used to fertilize the herbs and vegetables found on the menu.
GLBC has a cooling system in the Brewery cooler that brings in cold air during winter months to cool the beer. Skylights and light sensors have been installed in the Tank Farm and Brewery cooler to allow in natural light and minimize the use of electricity. An "air curtain" is in place in the Brewpub to keep warm air from escaping when patrons enter and exit.
To minimize the waste of throwing away "low-fill beers" (bottles of beer that cannot go to retail because they are not filled to the maximum level), GLBC uses the beer in a number of menu items, including salad dressings and the Stilton Cheddar Cheese Soup. Mitchell's Ice Cream also uses the GLBC Porter in the exclusive Edmund Fitzgerald Chocolate Chunk Ice Cream.
GLBC introduced its newly renovated Beer Garden complete with a retractable "Roman Curtain" roof. The Roman Curtain is a durable canvas roof that encloses the current open-air Beer Garden, which allows use of this indoor/outdoor dining area all year. The Beer Garden also includes a radiant heat fireplace and floor, a straw bale wall and 10 ft. high sliding glass doors.
For more information, please see www.greatlakesbrewing.com
Food waste composting
Cleveland downtown businesses avoid landfill, send food waste to be composted into soil additives
By Michael Scott, The Plain Dealer
May 16, 2010
Schools, colleges and other institutions can learn from Rocky River's Magnificat High School's waste reduction example. Recycling cardboard, paper, cans, plastic, glass, fluorescent bulbs and electronic waste is not enough. Consider food waste composting to get your waste closer to zero.
While some institutions like Magnificat High School choose to contract with a commercial composting company, others may find an effective solution by composting food and yard waste on-site. Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea chose to compost nearly all pre-consumer food waste from the cafeteria in an EarthTub. Carbon material like sawdust or wood chips are added to the EarthTub which automatically rotates the material and breaks it down into compost. If you have enough land, a less expensive option is to compost your coffee grounds and vegetable peels more passively in piles that are turned manually.
Magnificat's composting cuts waste going to landfill
By Kate Spirgen, Sun News
November 13, 2010