Doggy Bag or Compost Pile?

Used to be that the food you didn’t finish at a restaurant went home in a doggy bag or straight into the eatery’s trashcans.

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But now, depending on where you’re dining, those uneaten scraps could end up in a mountain of compost 150 miles away and maybe even ultimately help grow the food you’ll eat on another night out.

Participating restaurants in eight Orange County cities—including Dana Point, San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano—and the unincorporated areas served by CR&R Waste and Recycling Services have joined in a yearlong experiment to keep food waste out of landfills. Just like the push to recycle paper, aluminum and glass, officials are studying the logistics, costs and practicality of turning food waste into compost.

Every city in California is required to divert at least 50 percent of all its waste away from landfills. A restaurant, on average, disposes of more than 50 tons of organic waste every year. Californians overall throw away more than 5 millions tons of food scraps each year, said Maria Lazaruk, CR&R’s environmental manager.

Funded by a $400,000 grant from the county, the participating restaurants in the Stanton-based trash hauler’s program kept close to 1,000 tons of food scraps out of county landfills in the past 12 months, Lazaruk said.

Dana Point restaurants participating included the Ritz Carlton, St. Regis and Salt Creek Grille, while San Clemente’s participants included Adele’s Café, The Fishermans Restaurant and Tommy’s Family Restaurant. In San Juan Capistrano, the facilities recycling food scraps were a little more diverse and included Farm to Market, a grocery market with a deli, El Campeon Mexican restaurant, El Adobe and Casa de Amma, a live-in facility for adults with special needs.

Since the program started, Dana Point restaurants have diverted 272.38 tons of food scraps, San Clemente 109.80 tons and Capistrano 157.97 tons, Lazaruk said.

Also in the program: Two public schools, Ladera Ranch Middle School and Chaparral Elementary School, also in Ladera. Other restaurants started the program but dropped out.

It doesn’t take much to be in the program, said Marcos Costas, general manager at Salt Creek Grille. Participating restaurants are given additional collection cans to keep inside the restaurants, and employees sort the waste among traditional recyclables such as glass and paper, refuse and the food. CR&R picks up the food scraps twice a week, Costas said. The food-recycling cans are lime green.

“The restaurant’s been open 15 years, so there was 15 years of habits,” Costas said. “I posted signs where employees punch in for work and put them up where they get information on the daily specials … it took a little bit to get the muscle memory down, but CR&R made it so easy on me.”

Costas said the food-scrap recycling didn’t cause any problems.

“It’s one of those things you can be proud of for doing, but if I felt it was causing any kinks in the armor operationally, we wouldn’t participate,” Costas said. “It’s not, so we’ve never been prouder.”

Reyes Gallardo, general manager at El Adobe in Capistrano, agreed the program was easy on the restaurant, made famous as one of Richard Nixon’s favorites.

When the scraps leave the restaurants, they are trucked more than 150 miles to Thermal, the home of California Bio-mass, which has permits that allow it create 140,000 tons of compost a year, said Michael J. Hardy, one of “The Hardy Boys” who founded Bio-Mass with his brother in 1991.

The food scraps don’t add much value to the compost Bio-Mass creates from the manure and other waste it composts because it is so high in nitrogen, Hardy said. But the sheer mass amounts of compost created by Bio-Mass means the food scraps are “like a needle in a haystack” and don’t hurt it, either. But Bio-Mass charges CR&R to take in the waste, then charges customers—most large agricultural operations—for the compost it creates, too.

The process of taking those food scraps and turning them into compost takes about 13 weeks. Upon arrival, the waste is chopped up. Again, because of the huge amounts of materials being mixed, Bio-Mass can blend in dairy scraps and meat products—materials backyard composters can’t work with because they take so long to break down they can pose a health hazard.

The materials are molded into windrows on the 80-acre Bio-Mass property, and turned by machines. Regulations call for monitoring to ensure the material reaches at least 132 degrees for 15 days to kill off harmful bacteria, Hardy said.

Although permitted for 140,000 tons a year, Bio-Mass is doing about 70,000. That’s enough to put it in the top half of compost companies in the state, but leaves plenty of room for the food-waste programs to expand. “Our ambition is to keep moving these products forward,” Hardy said.

For now, it’s working without the Vintage Steakhouse in Capistrano. Vintage is one of those that withdrew from the program, said Matthew Timmes, one of the owners. While the Vintage owners figured out how to handle the lime green food recycling bins in the restaurant, the eatery’s outside trash bin areas were too crowded. “Space wise, it was a challenge,” Timmes said.

Still, he added, Vintage—green in another way because it grows basil, thyme, rosemary, sage, tarragon, onions and mints in an herb garden in front of the restaurant—would be happy to rejoin the program in the future.

They, and all restaurants, might have to in the future, Lazaruk said. The pilot program is determining how much the program costs CR&R to operate, and in the future the hauler will work with cities to determine how the program can be implemented with minimal impact on ratepayers, such as charging less for the food scraps than for non-recyclable waste.

But with the changes in participating restaurants, the tonnage generated in the pilot program was less than expected, she said, and the equipment costs a little higher than expected. Those lessons are spurring CR&R to ask the county to extend the program past its original end date this month to November. That will allow them to better nail down their costs and get more feedback from restaurant owners.

“We don’t want this program to go away,” Lazaruk said.

Neither does Adele Lux. The lifelong San Clemente resident owns Adele’s Café at the San Clemente Inn, where she recycles so much—glass, papers, cooking oils and now food waste—that she foresees a day when she might not send anything off to a landfill.

“My customers appreciate it,” she said. “But this is where I live, and that ocean is where I swim. It all makes a difference.”

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