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?
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.
Alright, everyone. Here is another case of the big guys with deep pockets picking on a small indy business for a ridiculous reason. Rock Art Brewery has a beer called the Vermonster. Doesn’t sound to me like anything that will be easily confused with Monster energy drinks, unless someone is mentally-challenged. Maybe the leadership at Monster is.
Boycott Monster, and tell them exactly what you think of them with the only thing they understand…the almighty dollar.
This article in The Columbian by Erin Middlewood, Columbian Staff Writer, brings to light magazines that are focusing on fashion for plus-size women. The article also says that 56% of women in the US wear plus size.
Is it just me, or is there a huge market niche that Camas could fill? My business classes always taught me to find the market niche and fill it and you will be successful. Give the big, beautiful girls of the world some beautiful clothes to buy and we will buy them. And please, make them affordable. Eileen Fisher has the absolute right idea and styling, but her clothes are out of budgetary reach for most of us.
I think if a Camas clothier did this right, they could make a small fortune. Anyone out there listening? Just because we’re not a size 6 does not mean we’ve lost our taste. Any other curvy girls out there with me?
How many ways can I say this to convey the joy in my voice…
Air conditioning, climatisation (en Francais), klimaanlage (auf Deutsch), condizionamento d’aria (in Italiano), aire acondicionado (en Español), condicionamento de ar (no português), and finally, 空気調節 (Japanexe).
Come in, be cool (but you’re always cool! I mean in temperature), and enjoy our new, improved atmosphere! And thank you all so much for your great patience…we appreciate your support more than we can express in words!
What a great time of year. The trees are all turning, the air is crisp and cool, and the rain that we are so famous for hasn’t quite started yet. It feels like a time for tuning up life. Making things better, more streamlined, simple. Ah, the simple life. When we’re in the midst of living our lives, we always feel they’re so complicated. Then, we look back on times past and feel they were simpler, easier. But they didn’t seem so then, did they?
So much of our lives is about perspective. It’s hard to be in the moment and not think about what needs to get done, what you’re behind on, what you need to make better. But that moment, wasted on thoughts of what should be getting done is doing you no good. This is so much of what I like about Zen Buddhism. It’s about being in the moment, concentrating on what is and what you are doing right now, and wanting what you already have.
I try to talk to our employees about this on a regular basis. I think some of them get it. I think, though, most people in their late teens/early twenties are so caught up in the speed at which all outside forces are trying to propel them that they can’t put the brakes on and extinguish those outside influences. So much of what they do for entertainment revolves around passive, yet speedy, activities, i.e. video games, texting, and the like.
I get texts occasionally from people I work with. I rarely return them. I just like talking to people face to face or on the phone. I don’t get the appeal of texting. I used to get (understand) IM’ing, when I didn’t have unlimited long distance in the form of a cell phone and I had friends in far away places. (Man, that really dates me, doesn’t it?) IM’ing made sense. We could talk for free. But texting? Why not just call? I like to hear the sound of someone’s voice on the line, connecting me to them in some real, if albeit distant, way.
Life is about connections, real connections with people. We cannot ignore the importance of these connections. So many of us raise the importance of so much of what takes up our lives above our connections to the people who are important to us. Cat’s in the cradle and all that. It’s easy to do. Life in this world seems to run at the speed of light, like no mere mortal can slow it down enough to return to some prior, simpler time. Take me back to the seventies, please. The clothing was bad, but life did seem to run at a much slower pace.
So take a moment this week, if you can, to slow it down a bit. I’m going to try. Life is too good to watch it pass by like the view from the window of a car going 120 miles an hour. Turn the TV and computer off. Take a walk. Take your dog for a walk. Take a walk in the park with your spouse. Call your best friend and ask them to meet you for a lazy afternoon of coffee and talk. Call your kids (or parents) and tell them how much you love them and how proud you are to have them in your life. Give thanks for all the blessings that you have right now. Love what you have right now. Maybe in this small way we can slow life down just a little, even if only for one small moment. But that small moment will mean a lot. Life is just a series of moments. Make the best of them.
