A Composting Case Study

Magnolia Bistro is a certified-green restaurant in Burlington, Vt. Since opening almost three years ago, the restaurant has been composting and recycling its garbage. Taking the concept of "reduce, reuse, recycle" to the next level, Magnolia reuses the buckets that its non-toxic dish soap comes in as composting, recycling and waste bins.

"The bins are color-coded, and the composting bin is closest to the entrance where the waitstaff enters the kitchen with scraps from our diners’ plates," says Owner Shannon Reilly. "This makes it easy for them to just toss the leftovers in the red bin and move down the line to the recycle bin and the waste bin.”

Shannon says he wishes more restaurants could see how easy it is to compost and recycle. He relies on a commercial company - unfortuntely, these aren’t available in all areas - to pick up his composted material and says he has no rodent problems at all.

Just as with commercial recycling, the composting company picks up the compost bins, which are full of food scraps collected by the restaurant, and bring them to a commercial composting facility. The facility takes the food scraps and turns them into compost and then soil. It’s basically large-scale composting, as opposed to composting in your backyard at home.

“If anything, I’d say composting is more manageable and less messy than putting bags full of food into a dumpster. Our composting company rinses our bins out for us, and they even provide biodegradable bags made from corn to line the bins if we want.”

GRA Tip: Real change simply requires a little adjustment of how we think. Think of an empty glass bottle as profit. Think of a half eaten salad as a resource. If we adjust the way we think, the resources and the profits are endless.