Upscale Restaurants are Making Compost

Restaurants in Bay Street Emeryville urban mixed-use center have combined their "resources" in a comprehensive food waste diversion program (that's a fancy way to say "making compost").

The first retail center in the California Bay Area to be certified as a green business, they sort their waste, separating biodegradable trash, food, and other recyclables.

The shopping center actually has a food-only compactor: food waste is hauled away, composted, cured for 90 days, then brought back to the city as high nutrient soil.

We use a smaller scale, lower tech version for making compost in my small health food store.

Our kitchen's organic vegetable scraps go into 5 gallon compost buckets, which are taken away every day by our Egg Lady. So our kitchen waste is run through chickens first before making compost.

There are several advantages to letting the chickens make compost for us: our trash collection bill is lower (we are charged by volume), we get great eggs to sell at the store, Egg Lady has lower feed costs, and chicken-made fertilizer for the blackberries and figs she also brings us.

This is not a new idea. Before pork was raised in factories, every restaurant had a couple of large vats outside next to the trash area - one for grease, and the other - the pig barrel. A local pigfarmer would trade it out for a empty one each night.

You can easily have an even smaller scale version in your own kitchen (for making compost, not feeding pigs).

Try keeping a large plastic container (with a good-sealing lid) under your kitchen sink. Rather than using the garbage disposal (a big water user) for food waste, chunk it in this container, instead. You can then use this "bounty" for making compost yourself.

If you don't have a lot of scraps each day, and think you might be waiting several days to empty them, consider a specially designed compost container with a charcoal filter for odors (also good in case you tend to "forget" to take your to-be-compost out to the compost pile or bin).

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