Something I have always been passionate about is food (both cooking it and eating it). I even wanted to be a chef when I was in high school. While I may be glad my ideal profession changed, restaurants still have an important place in my heart and are a huge piece of the picture when it comes to small business. Restaurants, as a whole, make up 4% of our country's GDP according to The National Restaurant Association. Of course, I know a lot of people are concerned with food waste, and for good reason. However restaurants, especially small ones who can't afford the expensive sustainable measures that large ones can, have many other types of waste that can be kept out of our environment.
Bottles and cans are a big piece of the recipe of a restaurant, and also an easy piece to deal with responsibly. Simply recycling is great, but many people don't understand how sensitive our recycling system is - Business Idea Alert: New recycling system. Left over food on the inside of a container can't be recycled with the container. In fact, pizza boxes can't even be recycled because the grease will ruin the batch of the paper waste and render unusable.
Cooking grease is another great resource that many restaurant owners don't know about. I don't know the science behind it personally, but if you have a fryer full of grease, thees someone with a car that can run off the stuff. The kicker: they will pay for it.
Sometimes its just as simple as rethinking your model. Some bars would rather increase their tap beers and decrease their impact on the environment by offering less glass bottles. This keeps people interested because you can change kegs when you want and kegs are always reused.
I got the inspiration for this blog from another blog that I found very heart warming. It goes through a few restaurants that have put these plans into practice and are benefiting from them greatly.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/223601
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