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ELIMINATING THE IDEA OF WASTE®
Posts with term ZWB X
This is the first truly waste-free bar in Brooklyn - and possibly America too
From wine corks to liquor bottles with non-recyclable caps to soapy dishwater that ultimately drips back into the water supply, restaurants generate an amazing amount of waste on a daily basis – and one small Brooklyn wine bar is looking to stem the tide.
According to the Green Restaurant Association, the average dining destination creates 100,000 pounds of garbage per year. Restaurateurs can divert 90% of that from the landfill with the proper recycling and composting program, the organization says, but Rhodora has taken the concept even further, completely eliminating all waste from its operations.
And to be clear, that means everything. No single-use plastics, no products or packaging that can’t be recycled, upcycled, or composted, and no trash in the kitchen, the dining room...or in the bathroom. Wines are natural and low-intervention, from small farms, and the menu – inspired by the conservas tapas bars of the Iberian Peninsula – is short and sweet, just tinned fish and seafood, pickles and charcuterie, cheeses and simple salads, with ice cream for dessert.
Rhodora is the work of the Oberon Group, a local restaurant group with a focus on community and sustainability, and though it’s the first zero-waste bar in Brooklyn, and likely the first in the US as a whole, it’s not the first in the world. The UK’s Silo, which opened in Brighton in 2014 and relocated to London just this fall, served as an inspiration, and the chef there helped the Rhodora team navigate through unfamiliar waters.
As Grub Street reports, they sought out cheeses sans wax rinds, breads that could be delivered by bike, and oysters that would come in a closed-loop delivery system – i.e., in packaging that goes back to the supplier to be reused. There’s a composter for food scraps, and as for that bathroom issue, there's TerraCycle, a New Jersey recycling company that handles hazardous waste – one of their collection boxes has been installed in the facilities.
The idea here, the team says, is a straightforward one: to set a standard for others to follow. “The food world has traditionally done such a poor job of being environmental stewards,” Oberon deputy director Halley Chambers told Grub Street. “If we can build a model of a sustainable trash-free relationship, suppliers can start replicating it.”
Carbondale nonprofit hosts America Recycles Day event
CARBONDALE. Il. (KFVS) -Keep Carbondale Beautiful is asking citizens to bring new ideas on ways to reduce, re-use, and recycle to the America Recycles Day event, on Nov. 14, at the Carbondale Civics Center.
The event will starts at 7:00 p.m. with presentations followed by a brainstorming session.
The nonprofit is looking for people with some tricks to share, and others who want to move closer to a zero waste lifestyle.
The amount of single use plastics has risen in the last few decades. Yet, market changes have restricted the opportunities to recycle.
KCB director Sarah Heyer said, “What’s needed is a two-pronged approach: first, avoid single-use containers by re-using bags and rejecting excess packaging. And second, maximize recycling."
For more information, contact Keep Carbondale Beautiful at keepcb1326@gmail.com or 618 525 5525.
This Zero-Waste Wine Bar Could Be The Future Of Conscious Dining
When I first heard that a zero-waste wine bar had opened in Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the city, I imagined composting how-to's on the walls and bamboo cups on the tables—telltale signs that a space is branding itself as sustainable in this day and age.
I found no such things when I visited on a drizzly evening this fall. Filled with weathered wooden booths, marble tabletops, flickering candles, and throaty background music, Rhodora feels like any other trendy restaurant in NYC. The space doesn't hit people over the head with its green ambition, Halley Chambers, Rhodora's deputy director, tells me from across the table, and in fact, many guests go the entire night without realizing that they're dining in a zero-waste experiment.
The subtlety is intentional: "It shows you can have this really beautiful experience that isn't reductive," Chambers says. "It doesn't feel sparse or scarce." It's true that unless you read the mission statement printed on the front of Rhodora's paper menus (biodegradable, of course), it would be easy to miss all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the space. "It's, of course, hard to see, because we have no waste," she smiles.
A full dining experience with zero waste.
So what does it mean for a wine bar to be zero-waste? For starters, it doesn't have trash cans. Anything left over after a nightly service is either recycled or reused. All food scraps are sent to the basement to be composted on site. Plastic cups, cutlery, and straws are banned. For times when waste is truly unavoidable (when a customer brings an empty chip bag in from outside, for example), there is one emergency box that gets sent to TerraCycle, a company that recycles things that would usually need to go to landfill.
More impressively, the food and wine that's served is also waste-free. Rhodora's staff picks up their own veggies from a nearby farmers market, the cheese and eggs are delivered in sturdy bins to be returned and reused, and anything that's shipped from out of town comes in packaging that can be recycled or composted—all the way down to paper tape. The supply chain is the biggest source of waste for most restaurants, Chambers explains, but Rhodora has found that many of their suppliers are keen to try out a more eco-friendly way of operating.
Their linen company, for example, was inspired to nix the single-use plastic wrapping it used for all of its deliveries after Rhodora requested that their shipment come in reusable linen bags. And their cleaning supplier, which operates nearby, agreed to make the extra trip to stop by and collect Rhodora's empty bottles to be refilled. "It speaks to the fact that everyone actually wants to do something," says Chambers.
Can this model work for other restaurants?
Despite the flexibility of some suppliers, maintaining a supply chain that's hyper-diligent about waste is still a huge challenge. Chambers says that single-use plastic inevitably makes its way into the front door sometimes, and there's some question over whether all their recyclables are actually getting recycled. She acknowledges that eateries outside a city like New York, where tons of producers operate within a few blocks of one another, would find it even more challenging to do business like this. Rhodora's menu is also limited to a few simple small plates (the emphasis is mostly on the fun, funky natural wine section), which means they have an easier time sourcing sustainable ingredients than a full-fledged restaurant would.
But the hope is that the space serves as a case study that others in the food industry can look to for inspiration. It doesn't set out to be a finish line as much as a starting point.
"We are acutely aware that our tiny natural wine bar is not going to have an outsized impact unless we find collaborators who are interested in pushing for the same thing," says Chambers. "The partnership aspect is so important—not just on a local level but on a systemic level of how we actually address waste."
The past, present, and future of conscious dining.
While it's the first of its kind in New York, Rhodora joins a small cohort of restaurants around the world that operate from a zero-waste mission. Silo, Douglas McMaster's fine dining restaurant in London, is probably the most impressive and well known, and it was the initial inspiration for Rhodora. (After doing a pop-up with McMaster, the Oberon Group, a carbon-neutral hospitality company in New York, was inspired to take its own sustainable mission further. When they found it too difficult to rejigger an existing restaurant into a zero-waste one, they opened Rhodora from scratch instead.)
"[McMaster] was instructive in showing us how much more we could do to reduce our waste footprint—and that running a restaurant is possible without trash," Chambers explains.
In talking with Chambers about Rhodora's early success, it's easy to believe that the zero-waste restaurant movement is just getting started: that the small outpost in Brooklyn is the latest in a chain reaction of eateries inspiring one another to do a little better, to use a little less.
Kindergarten in pencil recovery mode
Wishing to help the planet, the students of the 5 year old kindergarten at the Meander School are carrying out a nice project of recovering old crayons so that they can be recycled and transformed into objects of everyday life. The project is also educational and growing outside the walls of the institution.
Although the project has already been advanced by the Fondation du Méandre, it is anchored this year in the class of teacher Cynthia Lachapelle.
"The project is to collect pencils that contain ink originally and that no longer work," says the teacher. The desired pencils are pens, mechanical pencils, markers, highlighters, permanent markers, dry erase markers and color, with cap or not. The pencils are mine and colored.
After the harvest, the pencils are sent to TerraCycle as part of its vast campaign "Eliminate the Notion of Waste" active in more than 20 countries. The great American firm recovers and transforms, among others, pencils into everyday objects.
"Our goal in class is more educational: we count the pencils, so that at the end of the school year, we will know how much the students have recovered," says Ms. Lachapelle.
Learn through the game
When the pencils end up on the students' table after Mrs. Lachapelle has separated the prizes, in teams of four, according to their learning, they make bales of ten pencils, while others prepare bales of five. The teacher then bundles the packages with a tie.
"We learn how to make groupings so that they can learn to count in a fun way. They do not notice it because it is done by the game. Recycling is also an activity in which they want to get involved. Despite their age, they find it important to help the planet. "
Project of magnitude
Currently, most pencils come from parents. As of October 30, 180 pencils were amassed, counted and sorted.
In addition to primary, is the secondary school directly involved in the project? The teacher replied that energy has so far been channeled to the primary level, which does not prevent interested teachers from joining the project. High school students can easily find a place to drop the pencils.
In the class of Cynthia Lachapelle, 16 students participate in the project as well as a TES (Special Education Technician).
How to participate?
If you have the pencils that no longer work (pens, pencils, markers, highlighters, permanent markers, dry erase markers and colored pencils (they can come with or without the cap that is also recycled) you can route them by your children who will put them in the boxes that we have beautifully decorated. If you do not have children, you can come and bring them to the secretariat of the Meander School where there will be a box too. The pencils can also be deposited in boxes installed at CPE station Les P'tits Budgeons and Caisse Desjardins de la Rouge.
St. Anthony’s Green Team and TerraCycle help divert waste from landfill
The Green Team at St. Anthony’s School and TerraCycle, an international organization which upcycles garbage, have been offering Kincardine residents an option for items that are not typically accepted in other recycling streams, for six years. TerraCycle has a mission to divert some of the waste that would otherwise end up in the landfill and put it to use again, instead of just throwing it out.
“They are not recycling; they call it upcycling,” said Amanda Saxton, a teacher at St. Anthony’s School. “They take an item, break it down into pellets and then create something that will have a long life, like a paving stone or a park bench or watering cans and rain barrels – items that are going to have a long lifespan rather than a single use. Rather than using new resources they are reusing waste.”
Saxton said the unique thing about the program is that the items they accept change. TerraCycle is funded by corporations. For example, they had a cookie wrapper brigade which was sponsored by Mr. Christie, but they have recently stopped that program.
“It’s positive PR for companies,” she said. “They recognize that they are producing all this waste and there is something they can do about it.”
When programs end, it causes some difficulty for Amanda and the Green Team. They have to separate items that are no longer accepted, and many of them end up going to the local landfill.
She suggests people look at the current list of accepted items on the Kincardine TerraCycle page.
TerraCycle opened the program up to individual groups who could collect items within their communities. The Green Team at St. Anthony’s School saw it as a good opportunity for a school program.
“A lot of the waste we were accepting at the time was school lunch waste,” said Saxton, “items such as juice pouches and Lunchables trays.”
Then TerraCycle started accepting more items like diaper packages and cereal bags, which were not common items at the school.
It was opened up to the community and green bins have been placed through out the municipality. Green bins are currently located at the Tiverton arena near the dumpsters, St. Anthony’s School near the dumpsters, the Kincardine Library front entrance and the Davidson Centre, outside the new entrance.
Saxton picks it up about once a month and the students in the Green Team sort it out into individual streams. Then it gets shipped to TerraCycle Canada in Toronto for free. TerraCycle pays approximately one cent per item to the organization.
Over the six years since the Green Team started the program, they have earned $2,249.43.
The money they receive goes to buy the collection bins and to buy plants and supplies for the Green Team’s butterfly room at St. Anthony’s. It also gets used to bring in environmentally-related guest speakers to the school.
“Other companies pick a charity and their money will be donated to them,” said Saxton. “It’s kind of a two-fold benefit.”
Currently TerraCycle Kincardine accepts cigarette butts, outer milk bags, personal electronics, dishwasher tab packages, Tilda rice bags, print/toner cartridges, toothbrushes, toothpaste, single use flosses, markers and pens, Nespresso capsules, food pouches, Yves Cuisine packaging, Lunchables trays, Barilla packaging, EOS containers, Europe’s Best packaging, razors and packaging, Love Organics packaging, Febreze products and packaging, and they are now accepting old t-shirts, even it they are ripped, that they can turn into reusable shopping bags.
“The problem isn’t so much people putting things in that they think can be TerraCycled,” said Saxton. “It’s when they think our bin is a garbage can and they throw in their coffee … items that leak all over everything … items like milk bags, if they do end up all sticky and gross, they end up in a landfill. That becomes a problem when people put in leaky items that contaminate things.”
St. Anthony’s Green Team and TerraCycle help divert waste from landfill was last modified: November 6th, 2019 by Tammy Schneider
Here's a way to feel less guilty about all the Halloween candy you've been consuming: Recycle the wrappers to benefit children needing school supplies.
Schools and nature centers in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties are salvaging mounds of the colorful wrappers as part of an environmental awareness campaign. The Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach will gather the wrappers and send them to TerraCycle, a company that collects hard-to-recycle items and finds ways to reuse them. Terracycle will convert the wrappers into school supplies such as notebooks and pencils, Loggerhead spokeswoman Lauren Eissey said. It's the fourth year the Loggerhead center has collected wrappers for the program, which is designed to show the need for improved packaging that is less wasteful. She said Palm Beach County schools collected 92,352 wrappers last year. Collectors can drop off their wrappers at these sites through Monday, Nov. 11: *Summit-Questa Montessori School, 5451 Davie Road, Davie. * NSU University School, 3375 SW 75th Ave., Davie. * West Miami Middle School, 7525 Coral Way, Miami. *Loggerhead Marinelife Center, 14200 U.S. 1, Juno Beach. *Manatee Lagoon, 6000 N. Flagler Drive, West Palm Beach. *FAU Pine Jog Environmental Education Center, 6301 Summit Blvd., West Palm Beach. * Gumbo Limbo, 1801 N. Ocean Blvd., Boca Raton. * Sandoway Discover Center, 142 S. Ocean Blvd., Delray Beach.
10 things to know Tuesday
23 Things You Had No Idea You Could Recycle
FROM SOLO CUPS TO SWING SETS, THESE ARE ALL RECYCLABLE ITEMS.
When most people think about recycling, they picture empty cardboard boxes and plastic water bottles. But there are so many other old items hanging around your house that you can also recycle. Many companies will even pay you to bring these recyclable items in, simply because they are hard to come by and, well, there is no Planet B. Keep reading to learn about some of the surprising things that are actually recyclable and next time, think twice before you simply toss something in the trash.
