EcoLiving Ideas

By Brianna Marquart on Jul 16, 2010

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Working at a restaurant, you witness a lot of waste. In the nearly six years that I’ve been a manager at Bonfire restaurant, I’ve used my position to try and make its footprint less noticeable. Bonfire started as a family-owned business about fifteen years ago before recently evolving into a corporation. Regardless of our new ownership, my superiors are very open and supportive of making our business more environmentally-friendly.

My first endeavor was to get everyone in my office to recycle paper. I would pull wet paper towels, bottles and plastic wrap out of the blue bin on a regular basis. It took patience and gentle reminders, but now we’ve got it down. The single-ply and double-ply paper that we use to print off food and drink orders can also be reused. I bought some small storage boxes to use as recycling bins, and everyone has enthusiastically caught on! paper recycling

Other Bonfire greening projects include getting the prep cooks to recycle all of their empty plastic bottles and aluminum cans using a separate receptacle designated for these items. I also encouraged the staff to bring in their own reusable cups instead of using plastic kiddie cups for drinks during each shift. One of Bonfire’s servers collects all of the used crayons and brings them to the school where she works, while one of our bartenders collects old wine bottles to fill with her homemade Irish cream each holiday season. We unfortunately still use Styrofoam containers as doggie bags and plastic bags for our to-go orders. I’ve sent a few emails to our corporate chef and director of operations, however, and they told me last week that they are currently testing compostable to-go box options and paper-handle to-go bags with our restaurant's logo on them.

pig Other projects that are in the works for Bonfire include "Feed the Pigs", where restaurant food waste is picked up by local farmers and recycled as pig feed, and a lighting overhaul through Xcel Energy that would replace our existing lights with dimmable cold cathode lights -- each of which uses up to 92% less electricity per kilowatt hour than incandescent lights. Recently, a bartender approached me wondering why we don't recycle unwanted receipts at all of the service computer stations. Unfortunately, thermal paper receipts cannot be recycled. Hopefully this is something that will soon change, whether through new recycling technology or Earth-friendly receipt printers.

Although I still pull empty plastic containers out of the garbage (while enthusiastically announcing “We recycle here at the Bonfire!”), I feel that my passion for creating a less obtrusive footprint has definitely rubbed off on my co-workers and staff. One of the restaurant's former kitchen managers visited a couple weeks ago and told me that he started recycling paper in the office of his new restaurant job. Turns out he always hears my voice in the back of his mind when he throws something away that could have been recycled! If that’s not leaving a positive mark, I don’t know what is.