City is helping restaurants create compost with their leftovers.
An Ann Arbor restaurant has come up with a good idea...making compost. In a story from the Great Lakes Radio Consortium (Nora Flaherty reporting), Rene Graff, owner of The Arbor Brewing Company, needed someplace to put her peels, rinds and other vegetable waste. Ah, say the composters in our organization, let's make compost. That's exactly what Graff wanted to do. But setting up a backyard compost pile might only attract pests.
"The city didn't have a compost program where they could pick it up, and as a business," says Graff... "you really couldn't have somebody driving the waste out to the compost center, so that was a really big obstacle for us, was having pick-up."
As Graff began discussing the situation with others, she learned that Ann Arbor's Solid Waste Department was thinking along the same lines. A pilot program was born in which for two months, three restaurants separated their waste from prepping vegetables, along with coffee grounds and filters, for the city's yard waste trucks to collect.
Lots of trouble? Emily Adkison who manages the restaurant kitchen learned it was easier that they thought.
"We would have several bins, one at every station, one at the prep area, one up back on the line, one right over there by the dish area so the servers can put their used napkins in and coffee grounds," explains Adkison. "It's just as easy as having, instead of a garbage can. You have a 5-gallon pickle bucket and throw your scraps in there instead of in the garbage."
The stuff thrown in the buckets is collected by Ann Arbor's Materials Reclamation Facility, also known as MRF.
As gardeners, can't you just imagine MRF? Filled with what we call compost or black gold? As Nancy Stone, education director for the Solid Waste Department, explains, "It's rather crumbly in nature. It has a very sweet smell to it and it looks to me like beautifully ground espresso grounds," she said. "This is the best stuff to garden with. This stuff is the best stuff to think of putting on that garden."
In the two months that the Ann Arbor restaurant compost pilot program ran, nine tons of composted material was collected. Graff's restaurant alone accumulated one ton of food waste. She said she faced nay-sayers, especially from those who thought the amount of waste was too small to bother with. "We were shocked to discover that we diverted a ton of waste in two months," Graff explains, "and we would say yes, even the smallest little gesture can have a big impact, especially if everybody's doing it."
Apparently, the program has made an impression. Three more partners are joining the project in May. The folks in Ann Arbor hope that if it works in their community, others may find a way to deal with their food waste
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