From Chef David Brissenden
The other day, my friend Michele Beasley from Green Belt Alliance www.greenbelt.org gave me kudos for our efforts on greening our kitchen, from beginning to end, and it made me wonder how other kitchens deal with Recycling, Garbage and Compost.(RGC)
Now, from a guest’s point of view, most don’t want to hear about RGC, they just want a perfect event and to know that we are working our best efforts to help the community. However, it made me think; do other caterers actually take the tedious, time consuming task of recycling and composting? Do they care? How much do they care?
When I became Executive Chef of Catered Too one of my first steps to Green our kitchen was to make sure that every ounce of leftover food was properly cooled and taken to the shelters. Most of the time I would do it in my own car so that I could personally talk and meet with the directors and the chefs of the shelters and see what they need, how they were doing and generally work with them and the community on helping their residents get back on their feet. The two main shelters that Catered Too donates to are Salvation Army (www.usw.salvationarmy.org/usw/www_usw_gstate_3.nsf )
and Inn Vision. www.innvision.org
They not only are grateful of our food and drinks, but they really help people in need get the resources they need to find a job and move back into their regular lives.
The next step I took was to expand our recycling program. When I first came here, the recycling was your basic cardboard boxes and aluminum and plastic bottles. My instant reaction was that this was not enough! Immediately I had a meeting with my kitchen crew to discuss the importance of recycling, why it is necessary, where it goes, what it becomes and how it helps our company, our community and our planet. They were all really excited and we worked together as a team to implement a logistical way to deal with it.
We decided to just place all recyclable containers in with the dirty dishes so they could be rinsed and then I would load them up in my car to be placed in my recycling bins at home. (I had to space it out in different containers so that the condo complex would not get suspicious!) When I finally called Allied Wasted Management www.alliedwaste.com they told me just to put it in our white cardboard bin; that it was for all recycling material. They wanted to make it easy for customers so that we would be more obligated to do it. Unfortunately, they said, customers still just threw away all that recycling material. I was ecstatic, because my car was starting to smell bad, and my neighbors were getting suspicious when I would come home late and drop huge garbage bags in the recycling bins. This was also a huge amount of material, around 15,000 Lbs a year of reusable material, nearly 7 tons, not including cardboard and the aluminum cans!
At first, a lot of the service staff took me as a crazy dictator, but finally respected my passion and after some serious confrontations they have finally jumped on board. I am really stubborn, but hey I am a chef, we are all really stubborn.
Of course, all of this is just a side note to the cooking, creating, delegating and execution of our ongoing events that take priority, however as a company dedicated to our community, I made it a priority to make sure we do our part.
The next step took some phone calls, but in the end it was a very easy step: Composting.
I talked to the City of Milpitas www.ci.milpitas.ca.gov/ and they gave me the path back to Allied Waste and within a week we had the compost bin. Christine from Allied even came out to talk about what we were doing and what we could do better. She was very helpful and brought us diagrams of what and where to put it. They were all great to work with.
We went from an 8 yard garbage bin and a 4 yard recycling bin to a 12 yard Recycling bin, a 4 yard compost bin and a 2 yard garbage.
Basically, to take the steps to be green were extremely easy; all it involved was passion. Passion like that I have for food and I pass that passion on to my reflection of the community, environment, our Nation and our Planet. Being that it is the only one we have, I figured it was a great idea. I just hope that other Caterers/Restaurants care enough to take these easy steps to better their Community/Planet.
*** NOTE - we are almost Green Certified!
