For restaurants, it’s hard being green
Restaurateur Michael Wiebe comes clean about his efforts to compost
Vancouver restaurateur Michael Wiebe is in a scrap over table scraps. If he had his way, restaurants across the city would stop chucking their organic waste — fish bones, potato peels and the like — into the garbage and compost them instead.
But in an ironic twist to his campaign to usher restaurants into the 21st century, Wiebe says one of the biggest stumbling blocks to composting, apart from time and cash-strapped kitchens, is Vancouver, the wouldbe greenest city in the world with a ban on trashed food scraps set for 2015.
Wiebe, a Green party candidate for Vancouver park board and the owner of East Vancouver restaurant eight 1/2, was in the process of preparing a dish when he was dragged out of his kitchen by The Vancouver Sun to explain the situation.
Q Recycling and composting have been around for decades — how did restaurants miss the message about separating wastes?
A Restaurants are so busy, they have small margins, and high staff turnover. It’s one of those businesses where there’s so much going on that for a small-business owner, it’s something that sounds simple and straightforward but is not usually done. The city also doesn’t give them blue bins for recycling. Q Restaurants must generate a lot of garbage. A It’s amazing. When I started my restaurant, we’d open up a can of tomatoes — garbage. A jar of ba- nana peppers — garbage. The amount of waste that my little restaurant was making was unbelievable. Every time the fish guy delivered something he brought it in a huge Styrofoam container and just dropped it off. We threw that out twice a week. It was so obvious that this was not a good thing.
Q So most restaurants don’t recycle anything?
A Some small business owners are great. But most restaurants only have a garbage and a cardboard bin.
Q How many bins do you need for your kitchen to recycle properly?
A I had five bins — mixed containers, compost, small plastics, office paper, garbage. But I had too many. The city is trying to keep alleys clean, and part of that is trying to make everyone use just two bins.
Q Do you find it ironic that Vancouver is hindering recycling efforts despite the impending food-scrap ban?
A Yes. We’re finding difficulty still with the city. We just got our compost bin denied because of the two-bin limit, but it’s impossible to compost with just two bins. So we have three out there. We’re still working with the city.
Q So is it even feasible for restaurants to compost right now?
A We created a two-block “Green Zone” in an area of Mount Pleasant that had 10 restaurants — seven of them elected to try it out in 2013 and six are still doing it. Q Are staff OK with composting? A When they take things off the table, the servers go, ‘well, the straws go into the garbage and the lime goes into the compost, but I’m not putting my hand into someone’s glass with their saliva and everything,’ so I’ve brought compostable straws in. Now everything from the table — napkins, cutlery, chopsticks — goes into the compost. Our central garbage is now used for compost.
Q Does the compost smell? A If someone pulls the bags out and tosses them on the ground, yes, it’s an issue, but no more an issue than other garbage. Q What would help restaurants compost?
A There’s not a lot of space in some areas of town and restaurants may need to work together and share bins. If there was a nightly pickup service that would help. People like being green and want to be green. But if you don’t have the structure in place, you won’t do it.