zero waste actions to reduce food waste
The most effective plan to reduce your food waste is to make a back-of-house commitment and get started. Once your kitchen staff is running smoothly with your new composting process, start to engage your customers about your progress and get input from them about front-of-house composting. Depending on your service and ability to put compost, recycling and waste bins on your floor, you should be careful to properly plan a front-of-house composting program to minimize contaminated waste streams spoiling your efforts.
Why we need to compost our food waste
Why throw away food when it can feed people or provide nutrients to a local farm? Look for opportunities to turn imperfect produce and unused food into higher margin menu items. Compost everything else you can’t use.
Organic waste in our landfills creates a lot of methane that off-gasses into our atmosphere and has a seriously negative greenhouse gas impact on our planet.
Composting food waste back into local or regional farmland means we are creating a circular ecosystem between our farmers and dining establishments, fueling our food supply from our food waste.
The economy of this system will be circular as well, with the addition of compost haulers and processors that create value-added business programs to collect our waste and larger commercial composting facilities that convert our food waste into viable soil hummus in a matter of months.
Composting our food waste to farms is helping to sequester carbon into our soil.
Our partner compost haulers & processors
Scraps offers a compost pickup service that is tailored to work for just about any business that isn’t suited to a large-scale, truck-based compost pickup. Plus, we provide bins, free training, and all sorts of other perks. Our restaurants get more stout, rugged bins, with snap-on lids, tailored to heavier food waste and to outdoor pickups. Commercial service monthly fees are based on your volume. Serving the Denver Metro area.
Compost Colorado is a unique composting solution that collects your food waste, and also delivers local, sustainable products. All products purchased in their Simple Swaps store will be delivered in your clean bin as a part of the weekly bucket swap; this is our zero-waste delivery service. Onsite staff training is available. Commercial service monthly fees are based on your volume. Serving the Denver Metro area.
At Table to Farm Compost in Durango, we work with each commercial account to find a pricing and pick-up schedule that works for your business. Call them for pricing and to learn more. They have artisan soil that is created using the most nutrient rich material, which is sourced from their residential and commercial customers. Onsite staff training is available. Commercial service monthly fees are based on your volume.