Milwaukee restaurants adopt green practices
You decide to treat yourself to dinner at a local restaurant. Before dinner, the waiter brings both a complimentary water and your drink order, each served with a straw.
Your food arrives, but you forgot to tell the waiter about an allergy, so you apologetically send the meal back. The corrected dish arrives, and you finish most of it, but don’t quite make it to the clean-plate club.
You ask for a to-go container, pay your check, tip your waiter and drive home.
By themselves, a few straws, a plastic to-go container and a sent-back meal don’t necessarily amount to much. But add all of the meals the restaurant served that day, or that month, and the garbage stacks up.
Some members of Milwaukee’s dining industry are adopting practices to reduce that waste.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the U.S. wastes more than $160 billion worth of food annually, and the average person wastes about 4.5 pounds of food a day, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Christie Melby-Gibbons wants that number to be zero, at least at her restau-
rant. Melby-Gibbons is the owner of Tricklebee Cafe, a Sherman Park paywhat-you-can diner that is attempting to be zero-waste.
Melby-Gibbons said she composts 100% of Tricklebee’s food waste and provides customers biodegradable togo containers made from post-consumer waste. Tricklebee’s electricity is generated by wind, courtesy of Arcadia Power, an online energy platform that connects users with renewable energy.
“People like to see things like that,” Melby-Gibbons said. “So we consider it an investment.”
She said resources for restaurants that want to be environmentally friendly aren’t always readily available, so she has to be more intentional in seeking out responsible practices.
While sustainability has been touted as a way for businesses to save money, not all green practices benefit a company’s bottom line, and they sometimes cost more than the less-sustainable practices that were replaced.
Valeri Lucks has owned Honeypie Cafe, 2643 S. Kinnickinnic Ave., in Milwaukee’s Bay View neighborhood since 2009, and she said her mission has always been to be a responsible member of the dining community.
“We try to find ways to be good stewards in our neighborhood,” Lucks said. “We need to be responsible, and responsibility to me means being good to the neighborhood, the environment and the city.”
Lucks said she has to make tradeoffs to maintain that stewardship.
Honeypie recycles whatever it can. The restaurant is part of the “no-straw initiative,” a local effort following a national trend to reduce waste from plastic straws in landfills and the oceans.
Other Bay View businesses participating in the no-straw initiative include Classic Slice pizza and the Avalon Theater.
Honeypie also uses biodegradable to-go containers and almost entirely Wisconsin-sourced ingredients. Luck also hopes to start composting soon.
Lucks said biodegradable packaging can be up to five times the cost of nonbiodegradable products.
Lucks also works with the bicycledelivery service Forward Courier to avoid contributing to high vehicle emissions.
Founded in 2015, Forward Courier offers restaurant and wholesale delivery via cargo bicycles rather than trucks. Co-owner Brennan Kreiman said the idea came from friends who had done something similar elsewhere.
“Not only is it more green, it’s more efficient and cost-effective too,” Kreiman said.
Kreiman said reducing the number of large delivery trucks in Milwaukee is a main goal of the company, as well as helping to connect a network of local green businesses that wish to trade with each other.
Joe Wilson, executive director of Keeping Greater Milwaukee Beautiful, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization, said he thinks most restaurants are not doing enough to sustain the environment.
He said most restaurants still use Styrofoam packaging.
He said more restaurants should be wary of how much plastic waste comes from straws, and complimentary water that is not consumed is wasteful as well.
“I think it would be a great policy to ask first,” Wilson said. “Let the customer be part of the solution.”
Wilson said part of meeting a consumer’s needs means meeting their social expectations as well.