By Pamela Silvestri | silvestri@siadvance.com   STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- In a rough-and-tumble business environment, where entrepreneurs battle minimum wage increases and fluctuating costs, one Brooklyn eatery has come up with a unique business plan, according to a recent report.   The idea for soon-to-open Rhodora, according to an article in Grub Street, is to eliminate the chef position -- and trash. And, yes, that would be garbage -- such as food packaging, bathroom rubbish and other verboten disposables that cannot be recycled.   On the chef matter, Rhodora will have a menu format, as the article notes, that “lands between substantial bar snacks and light dinner fare — oysters and seafood conservas, cheese and charcuterie, sliced bread, a few other basic items like a bitter-greens salad and pickled vegetables.” So a staff of about a dozen basically pools tasks and runs the show collectively for a piece of the profits.   On the trash matter, the food service company that owns the restaurant, Oberon Group, has gone to lengths to generate zero waste, a business model they’ve spun successfully in other projects. The company, on its website, says it has been “carbon neutral or negative as of 2018.” Bathroom waste would be disposed of in TerraCycle boxes which are costly -- the article puts the price at $800 per box -- but do the environmentally sound trick.   Said the Grub Street piece, “Oberon has sourced wines in compostable boxes, dropped liquor brands that use unrecyclable caps (that’s more than you might think), found a dishwasher that uses electrolyzed water to eliminate the need for soap, gotten rid of paper receipts, tracked down a nonprofit called ReCORK that turns used wine corks into shoe soles, and, at least for now, has retired the Francis Mallmann–inspired oven.” (Mallmann is an Argentinian chef known for grilling.)   WOULD IT WORK HERE?   A South Shore restaurant owner was dubious of such a concept. Even with carting costs at an average of $500 per month, he said the idea is a tough one on Staten Island.   “There’s a lot of waste in restaurants. You can serve really top-quality food in small portions and people will balk,” he said, adding that Staten Islanders expect value (i.e. large portions) for their dollar.   “When you have these large portions you generate a lot of waste. To-go containers, plastic knives and forks...I just don’t see how it can work,” he said. “Eliminating a chef, and having the staff shuck oysters, slice cheese, mix drinks? All sounds nice but is that really a restaurant anymore?”   Mike Colameco from “The Bite” on Create TV had an interesting little tidbit recently on how in about 20 years people will be eating bugs. And, he predicts grasshoppers will be part of the cuisine. He compared it to non-Asians approach to sushi years ago, “gross” by some camps back then, but it’s certainly a flourishing concept now.   Do you think our restaurants should be more environmentally conscious? Or do you care when you eat out?

Yosemite, California’s renowned national park, is getting a facelift.   Yosemite Climbing Association is putting on their annual cleanup, Yosemite Facelift, from September 24–29. In addition to organizing a park-wide cleanup, Facelift incorporates panels, concerts and raffles and provides camping for 500 people throughout the week.   “[Facelift] gives people a chance to invest in their part,” says Ken Yager, who founded Facelift and coordinates the Yosemite cleanup every year. “We always hear the national parks belong to the people but until you’re there taking care of it, it doesn’t really feel that way.”   Facelift takes place between National and World Cleanup Day on September 21 and National Public Lands Day on September 28. The cleanup started in 2004, after Yager, a long-time climber who worked as a climbing guide in Yosemite, was embarrassed about the state of the national park.   “Any time you got off the road there was toilet paper everywhere,” he says. “I finally thought I can turn this around and get some friends together — we will go out and clean it up.” The first cleanup had about 120 volunteers. Today, Facelift averages about 600 people a day — not including participants of evening activities — and partners with dozens of companies, including Patagonia, North Face and Subaru. The National Park Service stated that in 2017, Facelift volunteers collected 6,790 pounds of trash and debris and put in more than 11,000 hours over the week. Most of that trash was cigarette butts, paper, aluminum cans and plastic water bottles, says Yager.   Facelift volunteers recycle what they can, sending metal to scrap yards and even partnering with recycling company TerraCycle to place boxes around the cleanup site. Terracycle can recycle harder-to-recycle materials like Styrofoam.   In addition to coordinating a cleanup every year, Yager is now pushing for more awareness in our consumption and waste habits.   “If nothing else, people are thinking about [their footprint], and I found that maybe they will be a little bit better when they are out in the woods,” he says. “[Facelift] helps raise awareness, but we still need to do more.”   That means using less plastic, much of which ends up in landfills, and taking accountability for our waste when we enter national parks. Given the success of Facelift in Yosemite, Yager hopes to expand the program to other national parks, like Shenandoah, Rocky Mountain, Joshua Tree and the Grand Canyon.     Austin Downs, Earth Day Network’s global cleanup coordinator, thinks Facelift represents more than just a cleanup.   “Yosemite Facelift is a strong illustration of how a cleanup can be part of something larger,” says Downs. “Facelift hits upon lots of other cool environmental actions that can be traced back to trash removal.”   Saturday, September 21, is World Cleanup Day and National Cleanup Day. Learn more about Earth Day Network’s Great Global Cleanup and End Plastic Pollution campaigns, and this Saturday, join forces with other volunteers to cleanup parks, trails, beaches and mountains in your community.

KAILUA-KONA — The search is on for volunteers to walk, swim, dive and paddle their way to cleaner beaches on the Big Island.

 

Saturday is International Coastal Cleanup Day, an effort to motivate communities around the world to save their oceans and shorelines from the trash that is currently polluting them.

On the Big Island, volunteers have several opportunities to participate in the worldwide cleanup.

 

Local group Keep Puako Beautiful is organizing its annual Get the Drift and Bag It cleanup at 25 various locations in South Kohala on Saturday, with the main cleanup headquarters set up at Hapuna Beach State Park.

 

The cleanup runs from 7:30-11:30 a.m., and participants can meet and sign up at the Hapuna Beach south pavilion.

 

In Kailua-Kona town, Jack’s Diving Locker and Big Island Divers are hosting an underwater cleanup dive at Kailua Pier from 8 a.m. to noon. The underwater cleanup is recommended to experienced divers, while participants who are not scuba certified are welcome to participate in the cleanup of shallow water through snorkeling, freediving and kayaking.

 

A Big Island resident for 40 years, Cynthia Ho, Keep Puako Beautiful’s site coordinator, has participated in every the annual campaigns in Kohala for International Coastal Cleanup Day.

 

“It needs doing,” Ho said. “I like my community, I like sharing the conservation effort with others and meeting like-minded people. It feels good.”

 

Volunteers can stay on site at Hapuna Beach, or break off to the other beaches along the coastline. Volunteers will regroup at Hapuna Beach at the end of the cleanup to weigh in and tally the trash collected.

 

Keep Puako Beautiful recommends volunteers to bring comfortable shoes, reef-safe sunscreen, food and water to the cleanups. Volunteers looking to clean up the trash in the ocean should bring their own gear.

 

“As far as water cleanup goes, they can snorkel in front of the beach and they can pick up a lot of stuff that way,” Ho said. “On shore, one woman told me she picked up 50 hair bands out of the sand at that beach.”

 

Ho said Keep Puako Beautiful’s Kohala cleanups will try to utilize anything that can be washed and reused. For example, the cleanups will use reusable grain bags donated from Big Island Brewhaus in Waimea and used coffee bean bags from Waimea Coffee Co.

 

Cigarette butts found through the cleanup can be separated from the other trash to be sent to the organization TerraCycle to be recycled into new industrial products, such as plastic pallets, and for the tobacco from the cigarette butts to be recycled as compost.

 

“We try to be a conscious as possible of not creating more waste,” Ho said.

 

Volunteers can sign up for the Hapuna Beach cleanup by emailing keeppuakobeautiful@gmail.com.

 

Free air tanks are available for certified divers at the Kailua Pier cleanup, and can be reserved by calling Jack’s Diving Locker at 329-7585 or by calling Big Island Divers at 329-6068.

KAILUA-KONA — The search is on for volunteers to walk, swim, dive and paddle their way to cleaner beaches on the Big Island.

 

Saturday is International Coastal Cleanup Day, an effort to motivate communities around the world to save their oceans and shorelines from the trash that is currently polluting them.

On the Big Island, volunteers have several opportunities to participate in the worldwide cleanup.

 

Local group Keep Puako Beautiful is organizing its annual Get the Drift and Bag It cleanup at 25 various locations in South Kohala on Saturday, with the main cleanup headquarters set up at Hapuna Beach State Park.

 

The cleanup runs from 7:30-11:30 a.m., and participants can meet and sign up at the Hapuna Beach south pavilion.

 

In Kailua-Kona town, Jack’s Diving Locker and Big Island Divers are hosting an underwater cleanup dive at Kailua Pier from 8 a.m. to noon. The underwater cleanup is recommended to experienced divers, while participants who are not scuba certified are welcome to participate in the cleanup of shallow water through snorkeling, freediving and kayaking.

 

A Big Island resident for 40 years, Cynthia Ho, Keep Puako Beautiful’s site coordinator, has participated in every the annual campaigns in Kohala for International Coastal Cleanup Day.

 

“It needs doing,” Ho said. “I like my community, I like sharing the conservation effort with others and meeting like-minded people. It feels good.”

 

Volunteers can stay on site at Hapuna Beach, or break off to the other beaches along the coastline. Volunteers will regroup at Hapuna Beach at the end of the cleanup to weigh in and tally the trash collected.

 

Keep Puako Beautiful recommends volunteers to bring comfortable shoes, reef-safe sunscreen, food and water to the cleanups. Volunteers looking to clean up the trash in the ocean should bring their own gear.

 

“As far as water cleanup goes, they can snorkel in front of the beach and they can pick up a lot of stuff that way,” Ho said. “On shore, one woman told me she picked up 50 hair bands out of the sand at that beach.”

 

Ho said Keep Puako Beautiful’s Kohala cleanups will try to utilize anything that can be washed and reused. For example, the cleanups will use reusable grain bags donated from Big Island Brewhaus in Waimea and used coffee bean bags from Waimea Coffee Co.

 

Cigarette butts found through the cleanup can be separated from the other trash to be sent to the organization TerraCycle to be recycled into new industrial products, such as plastic pallets, and for the tobacco from the cigarette butts to be recycled as compost.

 

“We try to be a conscious as possible of not creating more waste,” Ho said.

 

Volunteers can sign up for the Hapuna Beach cleanup by emailing keeppuakobeautiful@gmail.com.

 

Free air tanks are available for certified divers at the Kailua Pier cleanup, and can be reserved by calling Jack’s Diving Locker at 329-7585 or by calling Big Island Divers at 329-6068.

A discussion on how manufacturers can lessen their impact on the environment. 09.18.19   Sustainability is an issue of growing interest to the consuming public. On September 12th, at MakeUp in NewYork, Harry Bennet, adjunct professor Packaging Engineering, Rutgers, gave a keynote presentation entitled, “Packaging Sustainable Development and Circular Economy in Beauty.” The keynote was followed by a roundtable discussion on how sustainability can be integrated into beauty products and packaging, featuring industry professionals such as Ernel Simpson of Terracycle, Joe Licari of Shiseido Americas and Victor Bell of Environmental Packaging International.  

The first time Chloé Dubois saw a remote beach littered with plastics, she was struck by the grim reality of how big the problem had become. It was 2012 and Dubois was participating in a shoreline cleanup along the coast of Alaska. Within five days, the dedicated group had picked up 18,000 kilograms (40,000 pounds) of plastic pollution. Dubois has also been active cleaning up British Columbia’s coastlines. “It completely transformed my plastic usage and I knew I had to do something about it,” said Dubois, who is co-founder and executive director of the Ocean Legacy Foundation. “I think there’s a misconception that because we live in Canada, our coastlines are pristine. But depending on where you are, it can be incredibly polluted. It’s important to acknowledge the problem we have at home.” The Ocean Legacy Foundation has been cleaning up Canada’s coastlines since 2014, collecting more than 70,000 kilograms (157,000 pounds) of marine debris during its first year. But Dubois admits it’s a never-ending task. The foundation, along with dozens of other groups throughout southern B.C., continues to gather a colossal amount of debris, ranging from polystyrene, fishing gear, rope and beverage containers to tampon applicators, pens and shotgun shells. And it has found creative ways to repurpose the mountain of debris accumulating inside its Delta warehouse. Hard plastics from fishing floats are given back to Harbour Chandler Ltd. for fishers to reuse and repurpose. Fishing ropes are given out for art projects, such as carpet building, potted plants and bracelet making. Water bottle materials are being tested for shoe production and tires are being recycled into new rubber products. The foundation has also partnered with Lush Cosmetics North America, which uses the hard-mixed plastics collected from beaches to package some of its products. Other companies have also reached out to the foundation for sustainably sourced packaging. “We are working on what we want these plastics to be used for, so it doesn’t create more single-use plastic products we are going to have to clean off the beach,” said Dubois, noting the foundation will soon be able to process and transform rope and netting materials into pellets for re-manufacturing. “We need to be coming at the problem from different angles. There’s a lot of different interests, perspectives and solutions, and they all need to be part of the puzzle to move forward.” The Surfrider Foundation Pacific Rim Chapter has also found creative ways to turn coastal waste into consumer goods. Now in its second year, the Hold On To Your Butt campaign has recycled 500,000 cigarette butts from canisters placed along streets and beaches throughout Tofino and Ucluelet. The butts are sent to TerraCycle, which turns them into plastic lumber. According to Lilly Woodbury, a Surfrider Foundation Canada representative, cigarette butt filters can take up to 25 years to decompose and are the most commonly littered item in the world. In September 2019, more than 4,000 cigarette butts were collected during a cleanup in Tofino. “Recycling this material keeps it out of waters, public spaces and landfills,” said Woodbury, noting Surfrider also runs the Wetsuit Reincarnation Program, which recycles old wetsuits into yoga mats. “Mainstream wetsuits are made of neoprene, a petroleum-based material, which will never biodegrade.” The Province is exploring ways to address marine debris, marine-sourced plastics and abandoned vessels. Sheila Malcolmson, MLA for Nanaimo and Parliamentary Secretary for Environment, visited coastal communities during the summer to learn about solutions and make recommendations for provincial action. Learn More: For more information about abandoned vessels, marine debris and marine-sourced plastics in B.C. and to keep up to date on the parliamentary secretary for environment’s work, visit: gov.bc.ca/MarineDebrisProtection For more information about the Ocean Legacy Foundation, visit: https://oceanlegacy.ca/ For more information about the Surfrider Foundation, visit: https://www.surfrider.org/chapters/entry/pacific-rim

Montpelier, Vermont – TerraCycle, the world’s leader in the collection and repurposing of complex waste streams, has joined forces with Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District (CVSWMD) and local community organizations to recycle the world’s most littered item – cigarette butts. After being shipped to TerraCycle, the waste collected through the program is processed into plastic pellets for use in a variety of recycled products while the remaining tobacco is composted.   “Although we don’t want to encourage smoking, cigarettes aren’t going away anytime soon and when possible it’s part of our mission to keep materials out of the landfill and send them to outlets to recapture as many embedded resources as possible,” said Charlotte Low, former operations manager for CVSWMD. “Our program really gained steam when a group dubbed the “Trash Tramps”, a group of Monteplier senior citizens, volunteered to pick-up littered butts throughout the city and applied for a CVSWMD grant to place cigarette receptacles in highly-traveled areas, as well.”   On average, The Trash Tramps’ volunteers collect about 5 gallons of cigarette butts every two weeks, which translates to a significant amount of waste being diverted from sidewalks, parks, landfills, or even our shared waterways.   Through this program, CVSWMD is not only addressing the nation’s most commonly littered item but also a form of potentially harmful plastic waste. Since implementing the program, six cigarette collection receptacles have been placed near exceptionally busy street-corners, benches and parking lots throughout Montpelier. CVSWMD also provided grant funding to the Union Agricultural Society to purchase three cigarette butlers located throughout the Turnbridge fairgrounds.   Participating in TerraCycle’s Cigarette Recycling Program is CVSWMD’s latest effort to grow their socially-responsible, environmental initiatives. In addition to introducing cigarette recycling, CVSWMD’s works to set a sustainable-example for the community through operation of the Additional Recyclables Collection Center (ARCC) in Barre City where nearly 40 hard-to-recycle materials, including shoes, pellet bags, and waste from various TerraCycle brand-sponsored collection programs are aggregated.   All of the collected waste collected through the Cigarette Recycling Program is shipped to TerraCycle for recycling. When processed, the paper and tobacco is separated from the filter and composted. The filter is recycled into plastic pellets which can be used by manufacturers to make a number of products such as shipping pallets, ashtrays and park benches.   “These receptacles will help keep Montpelier free of one of the most littered items on the planet,” said Tom Szaky, the founder and CEO of TerraCycle. “With this program, Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District is taking a step to reduce the amount of trash going to landfill while also preserving the area’s natural beauty.”   TerraCycle has collected hundreds of millions of cigarette butts globally. Additionally, through its various recycling programs, it has engaged over 200 million people across 21 countries to collect and recycle more than eight billion pieces of waste that were otherwise non-recyclable.

After a particularly bad bout of breakouts three years ago, a friend told Drea Gunness-Groeschel that her dirty makeup brushes could be to blame. Like most friends, Gunness-Groeschel’s was right, and she pledged to wash the brushes regularly to keep them from getting grubby.

  The best-laid plans of makeup users often go awry, though. Then CEO of a candle and home décor company, Gunness-Groeschel was frequently on the road and couldn’t maintain the brush-cleaning routine. Dermatologists recommend washing makeup brushes every 10 days, she says, but Gunness-Groeschel wasn’t doing so nearly enough.   “There’s no way! I’m traveling all over the world and, when I’m on the go, I’m not going to clean my brushes, never mind that, but the cleaners you can buy, I don’t want to lug them around,” she says. “I was like, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’” Pondering a possible better way, she mused, “If it was just like a razor blade, and I could pop on a new head, that would make my life so much easier, and that [was] really the aha moment.” After studying the market and asking the opinions of women she ran across, including strangers at restaurants and stores, Gunness-Groeschel concluded there was a genuine void for an interchangeable alternative to standard cosmetics brushes. So, she quit her day job and got to work.   Gunness-Groeschel’s previous supply-chain management experience and roughly $1 million in seed funding expedited the development timeline. Once she began to turn her idea for replaceable makeup brush heads into merchandise, it took nine months to create Beautiac, Gunness-Groeschel’s new brand. The nine-month process, however, wasn’t perfectly smooth. There were plenty of hurdles.   “If it was just like a razor blade, and I could pop on a new head, that would make my life so much easier.”   “To be honest with you, I underestimated what reinventing a makeup brush would be like,” says Gunness-Groeschel. The biggest challenge was pinning down a universal handle that would adapt to several brush heads, a dexterity that makeup brushes never had before. Gunness-Groeschel says, “I had literally a team of five guys on it that were struggling. Eventually, they threw up their hands.”   A second team, which boasted 50 years of experience engineering beauty consumer goods, couldn’t execute it either. “I was very discouraged,” admits Gunness-Groeschel, who thought, “Maybe that’s why it hasn’t be done. Maybe it’s just too difficult, but you just keep barreling forward if you have the vision and you have the gut for it. Following the first two teams’ failed attempts, she connected with a plastics engineering team in Ohio. Fortunately, the third team was the charm. Its members understood her vision. The next challenge was identifying the right brush manufacturer. To do so, Gunness-Groeschel headed to China. Unimpressed by conditions in many of the beauty product manufacturing facilities she toured, Gunness-Groeschel decided to take her search out of the beauty market completely. She landed on a Chinese factory that services Tesla and Quip. Part of the reason finding the right manufacturer proved to be difficult was due to the way Gunness-Groeschel sought for the brushes to be made.   “We wanted to make the hairs of the brush out of the same material that we make the ferrules, which is the cuff that the hairs sit in,” explains Gunness-Groeschel. “This creates a single material item that is 100% recyclable.”   “We wanted to make the hairs of the brush out of the same material that we make the ferrules, which is the cuff that the hairs sit in. This creates a single material item that is 100% recyclable.”   Beautiac has teamed up with recycling specialist TerraCycle on its zero-waste box program. A recycling bag comes with the brand’s starter kits that can be sent back to it with products that it makes sure are recycled by TerraCycle. Components can also be tossed into the recycling bin with routine household recyclables.   “A lot of beauty companies are using TerraCycle because literally they 100% guarantee that, if it is sent back, they will recycle it,” says Gunness-Groeschel. “For our particular product, they’re able to chip them [the old brush heads] down, and they re-melt them into planters, picnic tables, park benches [and] community beautification project items. So, dirty brush heads are getting a full circle.” Beautiac offers a VIP Kit to online subscribers for $16.50 to $20 per month. It contains three makeup brush heads, a makeup sponge, three makeup brush handles, a stand and a bag.   Beautiac’s brush sets are sold online via subscriptions priced from $16.50 to $20 per month. Its VIP Kit includes three brush refill heads (one for foundation, one for powder and one for blush), one Blur Sponge, three Universal Handles, one Smart Stand to hold the brushes and one Safe Bag. Beautiac plans to introduce a customized system soon allowing customers to alter delivery dates based on their shipment scheduling preferences. By Jan. 1, customers will also be able to choose the exact brush heads they want replaced. The brush heads currently come as a full set.   Gunness-Groeschel projects Beautiac’s sales will cross the six-figure mark by the end of the year. For 2020, the brand’s goal is to explore retail and draw 15,000 direct consumers. That’s a lot of Beautiacs. On the topic of the brand name, Gunness-Groeschel’s husband came up with it. “He thinks us ladies are a bit nuts when it comes to our beauty routines and that we are maniacs about our beauty products,” she says. “Then, to be funny, he said, ‘You all are Beautiacs.’ We both looked at each other, and I was like, ‘On my God, that’s an awesome brand name!’”

THE OXFORD STREET BRANCH OF THE BODY SHOP HAS BEEN TRANSFORMED INTO AN “ACTIVIST WORKSHOP” AS PART OF THE ETHICAL BEAUTY RETAILER’S PLEDGE TO REVIVE ITS EARLY CAMPAIGNING SPIRIT.

  The new central London concept store encourages customers (Body Shop calls them “visitors”) to explore and recycle products and discover how they “can fight for a fairer and more beautiful world”.   The tone is set by the many sustainable store fixtures that have been incorporated into the new fit-out. Recycled plastic and reclaimed wood are used throughout while external cladding is made from eco-friendly zinc (which uses less energy to produce than other metals and is fully recyclable). Meanwhile, worktop surfaces are manufactured from 100% recycled materials destined for landfill, and stools are made with reclaimed steel.   At the activists corner customers can find out about The Body Shop’s activist roots and how they can get involved and take a stand on green issues themselves.   Other special features include a refill station, where customers can buy a refillable 250ml aluminium bottle to fill up with a range of shower gels and creams, and a recycling bin (operated by recycling specialist TerraCycle) and a water station.   The interactive theme continues more conventionally with a gifting station, where customers are encouraged to get creative and personalise gifts with stamps, ribbons and recyclable paper.

MONTPELIER, Vt.- A group of volunteers are working to keep the streets of Vermont’s Capitol City litter free piece by piece. “We meet every week, this is the end of our fourth year,” said Anne Ferguson, a founder of Trash Tramps. Equipped with bags and tongs, the group deploy every Tuesday afternoon from the Montpelier Senior Activity Center on Barre Street. “It’s a spiritual practice, you know,” said Ferguson. “It’s caring for the earth” In the beginning, volunteers picked up all the trash they could find. But they quickly realized something was being overlooked: cigarette butts. “You drop your butt on the sidewalk, it’s going to get washed into the storm drain and therefore get in the river,” said Ferguson. Ferguson says the self-proclaimed tramps collect 3,000 to 4,000 butts a week. That’s more than 800,000 butts since the group was formed in 2015. “It’s not because we’re really big smokers here,” she said “It’s because we a system in place to collect them.” The group brings the butts to the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District. “We ship them to TerraCycle which than coordinates the recycling of those items,” said Brenna Toman. When processed, the paper and tobacco is separated from the filter and composted while the filter is recycled into plastic pellets. “They’re used for plastic pallets for industrial uses but also for plastic park benches and outdoor furniture,” said Toman. CVSWMD has helped the secure grants for the tramps to help support their efforts. There have been several sidewalk buttlers installed around the city which collect thousands of butts every year.

Henry Moynahan Rich spent his summer being haunted by trash. He needed to figure out how to eliminate it completely. In July, his company, Oberon Group, closed the Fort Greene restaurant Mettā with a goal of reopening it in the fall as the first truly zero-waste restaurant in New York and possibly in all of America. That meant not only the restaurant’s waste, which he could control, but also the gum, empty cups, and hygiene products his customers would bring in.   “We have to be honest,” he explains. “This is going to be an inconvenience to guests, and we’re in the hospitality business.” He’s not excited about the prospect of saying no to his customers: “People are going to say, ‘I’m paying you. Can’t you throw this away for me?’ And we’re gonna have to be like, ‘Nope, sorry. We actually don’t have a means of dealing with this here.’”   In reality, Mettā had been trending this way for some time. In 2017, Rich, Oberon deputy director Halley Chambers, and the rest of the team had made it New York’s first carbon-neutral restaurant. Everything was cooked over a single fire fed with responsibly forested local wood, the group bought renewable energy, and the remaining emissions (the equivalent of roughly 50,000 gallons of gas per year) were offset by investments in carbon-negative initiatives. Leftover citrus rinds at the bar were turned into salt, and the kitchen stored gallons of fermented ingredients.   Now they’ve gone all in, and the restaurant is slated to reopen later this month. The space looks the same, but Mettā will be renamed Rhodora, after a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem. The hope is the new model will create a template that other restaurateurs, and the companies they work with, can follow to cut down on or eliminate their own waste. Oberon has sourced wines in compostable boxes, dropped liquor brands that use unrecyclable caps (that’s more than you might think), found a dishwasher that uses electrolyzed water to eliminate the need for soap, gotten rid of paper receipts, tracked down a nonprofit called ReCORK that turns used wine corks into shoe soles, and, at least for now, has retired the Francis Mallmann–inspired oven. (For that matter, Oberon’s other businesses — including June, the Cobble Hill wine bar, and a catering arm called Purslane, which is already waste free — operate with sustainability in mind too.)   As Chambers explains, “the food world has traditionally done such a poor job of being environmental stewards — if we can build a model of a sustainable trash-free relationship, suppliers can start replicating it.” Restaurants sometimes use the term zero waste to refer to a nose-to-tail, stem-to-root ethos in the kitchen. And in fact, Rich first tried to remove kitchen waste completely when the restaurant was still Mettā. Doing so while the place was up and running proved too difficult, however. “Trying to reverse engineer it would never work,” Rich says. At Rhodora, the focus will be on natural wine and simple food, so the restaurant can extend its mission even to its suppliers. “The entire company doesn’t have to be trash free,” Chambers explains, “but our direct relationship with them does.”   So all cheeses must be used in their entirety (no inedible wax rinds) and delivered in reusable containers. Brooklyn butcher shop Marlow & Daughters will bicycle over cured meats, jars of chicken-liver mousse, and pickled veggies. Marlow’s sister bakery, She Wolf, will do the same with bread — initially, rye loaves, ciabattas, and baguettes. Le Petit Poisson, a tiny Brooklyn distributor that pushes sustainability, has offered to deliver oysters in what are likely New York’s first returnable oyster packs. Spent shells, meanwhile, will go to the Billion Oyster Project to help restore New York’s waterways. Anything guests leave on their plates will be fed into a commercial-grade composter, along with shredded-up bits of any cardboard packaging. Perhaps counterintuitively, many of the wines will come from France. Rich’s position is that he’d rather offset the emissions caused by importing natural wines from an artisanal winemaker overseas (a sliver of the bottle’s total carbon footprint, anyway) than buy from closer producers whose principles are less aligned with Rhodora’s.   In addition to waste, something else will be notably absent from Rhodora: a chef. The menu lands between substantial bar snacks and light dinner fare — oysters and seafood conservas, cheese and charcuterie, sliced bread, a few other basic items like a bitter-greens salad and pickled vegetables. Staff won’t need culinary skills beyond the ability to shuck oysters, dress a salad, and plate a cheese board. That was intentional because Rich also wants Rhodora to jettison traditional restaurant roles, particularly the part about porters and bussers cleaning up everyone’s mess. “The whole idea is taking responsibility for your own waste,” Rich explains. “It felt weird to have a guy running around cleaning up after everybody.” They hired a team of half a dozen, and, depending on the night, an employee might prepare oysters, recommend wines, or mix cocktails. Cleaning and educating diners about zero waste are duties everyone splits, and they all receive profit shares.   Even though Rhodora is unique among New York restaurants, Rich and his team have leaned on sustainability pioneers industrywide since Mettā’s start. The move to carbon neutrality, for example, was inspired by Anthony Myint, the Mission Chinese Food co-founder who now runs Zero Foodprint, a nonprofit focused on fighting the climate crisis, which boasts partners such as Noma, Osteria Francescana, and El Celler de Can Roca. (“Henry and the folks at Mettā are like our kindred spirits on the East Coast,” Myint says.) They also worked with the chef Doug McMaster, who runs Silo in London, the U.K.’s first zero-waste restaurant. (Five years in, Silo kilns its own plates from plastic bags, upcycles food packaging into tables, and sports a carbon-negative floor made from bombproof cork.) Last November, Oberon co-hosted a zero-waste pop-up with McMaster and Lauren Singer, of Williamsburg’s zero-waste home-goods store Package Free.   Which brings us back to the trash: Even though Rich knew how to eliminate the waste his staff and partners would create, he still needed to take care of customer-generated rubbish, especially in the restrooms. Package Free, like many retail shops, simply doesn’t have a bathroom, so Singer never had to devise a plan for customer trash. When Rich asked McMaster how Silo had solved the problem, the chef was confused; the U.K. has companies that specialize in recycling the bathroom waste products that had Oberon stumped.   The group considered opening with a sign in the restroom that asked guests to brainstorm solutions. A few weeks ago, though, it found an answer. To recycle Saran wrap, Mettā had used a New Jersey–based company called TerraCycle that runs a curbside-pickup program for difficult-to-recycle items: cigarette butts, gum, cooking oil, batteries, even hazardous waste. It would be expensive — “a box may cost you $800,” Rich says — but that waste wouldn’t be a problem. They’ll have two TerraCycle boxes, one in the bathroom, another for random litter that guests leave on the bar or tables.   Still, it’s another cost in a low-margin industry that Rhodora will have to absorb, at least until a better option presents itself. “If zero waste is our mission, the entire program has to be built around that,” Rich says, pointing out that his goal is to start with sustainability and turn that idea into the same thing every operator wants: a place with delicious, affordable food where customers return again and again. “Sustainability can’t be a special-occasion thing,” he argues, “because if that is the case, this movement will fail.”