Restaurant recycling is still, unfortunately, something most restaurants don’t bother to do. The reasons are many. Most waste companies don’t have mechanisms in place for business recycling. It’s messy. It stinks up the vehicle you use for recycling. You have to create an area inside or outside of your restaurant to store the materials intended for recycling. But still, recycling is easier and more common than composting.
Composting our restaurant waste is something we’ve been talking about for awhile now, and something we want to implement this spring/summer. Help from the local waste company would be wonderful, but I don’t think we’re there yet. Here’s an article in the Orange County Register that details a restaurant composting pilot program that’s happening there. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get something similar started here?