Composting at restaurant scale | June 2021
It’s been about 8 months since we broke ground on a new composting project behind Teikoku restaurant in Newtown Square, and it’s going great. For those who don’t know, the big idea behind composting is to let fruit and vegetable scraps decompose aerobically, and the benefits are many:
Aerobic decomposition releases carbon dioxide, whereas food scraps ending up in the landfill decompose anaerobically and release methane, which is 20-30 times worse for climate change
Less waste to drive away — cuts down transportation emissions
The final product is super nutritious for your garden — lots of good bacteria and fungus, worms and rolly polly ollies, etc.
The rule: only plant material, absolutely nothing animal derived. The kitchen staff add scraps to it each day, and then I visit once every week or so to turn it (mix it up for oxygenation) and to add browns (to balance the carbon:nitrogen ratio in the pile). I found all the composting knowledge on the web intimidating at first, but it seems like a pretty forgiving system.
We started with an open pile approach in a little shed built about 100 feet behind the restaurant:
It actually went pretty well! It got nice and steamy in the center (a good sign) and the volume condensed considerably (another good sign).
The health inspector wasn’t too keen on that, so we moved to bins.
Something I’m in the midst of learning is the right amount of browns to add — in the form of cardboard and woodchips, mostly. It seems to help a ton in terms of keeping the fruit fly count down, and speeding up the process to the final blackened humus, as I think it’s called.
We’ve finished one full cycle and have used it to enrich some new garden beds in the hill behind the restaurant, which are now growing basil and chili peppers for the restaurant to use. It’s amazing how much the volume decreased through the process!
(The finished pile smelled so good and earthy, it even invited a toad to move in)
The operation is still ramping up, so stay tuned!
