Restaurant produces less than one grocery-size bag of garbage per week

At Moby’s Oyster Bar + Marine Grill we take our recycling seriously. As the leading pub on Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada, we have achieved an astonishing rate of garbage reduction. In less than a year our restaurant has moved from creating nine cubic metres of waste to about three small grocery bags, per month.

The restaurant industry is notorious for the amount of waste it produces, from food scraps, plastic wrap, cardboard and plastic and other containers. At Moby’s, we estimate that we serve an average of 30, 000 meals each year, yet we produce far less garbage than the average family household. How do we accomplish this?

Our entire staff is dedicated to recycling. The first step is believing that you can make a difference in what ends up in landfills across the nation.

We have learned to identify all the different materials we handle and to have containers ready to receive the different types of recyclables we generate. Our kitchen is fairly small, but we utilize the space well to accommodate our recycling needs.

Moby’s gradually implemented the recycling program over the course of slightly less than a year. That’s enough time for the staff to develop the habit of separating our waste stream into its basic components.

We divide our waste into categories: organics, cardboard, hard plastics, glass, metal & foil, soft plastics and ‘garbage as a last resort’. Cardboard was the easiest to separate and we’ve done that for a long time. Glass, metal and hard plastics were next. This was easy as we do not produce too much of this type of waste. The biggest step was learning about – and then separating – our organic waste. That caused the single biggest decline in our garbage output.

About two months after we began to recycle our organics, our service provider, Refuse Resource Recovery in Victoria, brought us some small bags of composted material. We handed these out to each staff member at our regular weekly meeting. It was at this moment that the light really went on for us. We all realized that what we sent out of the restaurant was actually being returned to the land for productive use, closing the loop and making the lifecycle of waste come alive for us. That was a very exciting moment! It’s quit amazing to see our garbage leave our premises as waste and have it returned as soil for our gardens!

After that, we started to separate our soft plastics and now we are almost garbage-free. We have also learned to separate the waste that accumulates at the bar, like straws and bar fruit, corks and bottle caps, so there is virtually no waste from the front of the restaurant either. That is a great accomplishment, showing that our whole team is supportive of our recycling program.

There are a few things we can’t recycle yet, like broken plates, glasses and light bulbs. But we are all eager to see if we can become completely garbage-free. We’re very close to achieving that goal and we are working with our service partners, to see what else is possible. We pay to have our garbage removed from the Island and we’d much rather see our restaurant waste go into the stream of re-use rather than into landfills.

Thanks for supporting Moby’s drive to be Salt Spring’s – and one of Canada’s – greenest restaurants!