ORGANIC WASTE RECYCLING PROGRAM


By composting your restaurant’s food waste into rich, organic compost, you can reduce your carbon footprint, gain new customers, and reduce your solid waste pickup fees. Not only is composting an environmentally friendly solution for reducing waste, California Assembly Bill 1826 legally requires all commercial businesses to separate their organic waste if they produce over two cubic yards of solid waste per week. Most county’s environmental health departments allow restaurants with the space to create a restaurant compost operation plan and an odor mitigation program to safely turn food scraps into a valuable soil amendment that could then be used to grow their culinary garden, like the one pictured below.

In addition to simply crunching the numbers to see if the restaurant you want to open has a chance of succeeding, our restaurant consultants can help your business compare different staffing strategies and pay rates/benefits in order to find out what would work best for your situation. We’ve found that offering competitive salaries and hourly wages (not just minimum wage) pays for itself in the long run with better employee productivity, morale and retention. It costs over $6000 in training, ingredients and labor costs to train a new employee and many restaurant owners only think about their weekly labor costs and not long term costs like re-training, hiring and firing of poorly performing workers. With restaurant profit margins as razor thin as they are, a couple of percentage points saved here and there on labor, food cost or paper goods could make the difference between a profitable restaurant and closing the doors forever.

Consumers are starting to wise up to the greenwashing common in restaurants claiming to be “green” or “eco-friendly” and are demanding to see precisely what those businesses are genuinely doing to reduce their carbon footprint and environmental impact. Instead of seeing this as another problem, invite your customers on your sustainability journey by asking them to separate food waste, compostable utensils from recyclable materials, and items destined to the landfill. By making your restaurant’s sustainability goals a core value of your business, you can attract new clients and gain existing customers’ loyalty.

How Can We Help?...

  • Organic Waste Recycling Program
  • Waste Reduction Techniques
  • Restaurant Composting Plan
  • AB 1826 Compliance
  • Reduce Waste Disposal Fees
  • Food Waste Reduction

RESTAURANT COMPOSTING PROGRAM


Restaurants produce a lot of waste, but instead of sending it all to the landfill to turn into harmful methane, a greenhouse gas, your business can instead create its own restaurant composting plan and turn it into a valuable resource: compost. With as little as a 25 square foot space for a compact, inexpensive composter, our team can develop, write and help you implement an effective composting program that is legal, odor and pest free, and subscribes to all local and state environmental health requirements. Your customers will appreciate your restaurant's commitment to the environment, and that can translate to higher sales, more revenue, and higher profits. By reducing the amount of waste produced you can lower your carbon footprint, food costs, and improve your bottom line.

Food waste isn’t the only product that can be diverted from your restaurant’s solid waste pickup program; cardboard, paper towels, and compostable dinnerware can all be biodegradable under the right conditions. By reducing the volume of waste that your disposal service has to pick up, you can lower your restaurants’ solid waste disposal costs and create compost that your restaurant can then use to grow its food, lower food costs, and improve all-around sustainability.