Going green in a busy restaurant is difficult; there are obstacles to going green on this scale. But we are working on it, little by little…a little more with each incarnation.
We have always recycled, from day one, even though it’s not easy in our little town. There is no glass recycling for businesses here, and because we want to send as little as possible to the landfill, we haul all of our cardboard, paper, plastic, and glass recycling to the recycling center. Not a glamorous job, but we do it because we believe it’s the right thing to do. The eventual, and less wasteful, thing to do would be to get more keg coolers and have more beers on tap, but we are extremely limited on space in the back of the house, so at least for right now, that is not an option.
Over the last several weeks, we have been transitioning all of our to-go containers to compostables. This transition is now complete. Compostable containers used to be absolutely cost-prohibitive. That is the main reason we did not go this way from the beginning. We simply could not do it with the costly nature of start up and our limited budget at that time. Now, compostables have come down in price–they are still more expensive, but at least our food rep doesn’t choke when we talk about going green. Our rep is all about green, has helped us enormously in the transition, and is working to help us go even further than we thought we could.
Our next step is to do composting ourselves, once we consult with a Master Gardener to see if this is feasible on the scale we need. It’s probably the biggest and hardest step towards being green that we’ll make, but this is the way we had intended from the start, so we are glad to finally be able to talk about it and work towards it in a serious way.
If you have questions or suggestions (including suggested readings and the like), we would gratefully take them. We have been out of the educational loop for awhile, restaurateuring being an all-engrossing profession, so we have a lot to learn. But this is one of the things we believe in strongly and we want to make our carbon footprint as tiny as we possibly can. We look forward to the process of learning better ways to deal with the waste created by the restaurant and in making Twilight truly green.
