When eating out I often think, I hope this restaurant composts what I leave on my plate. Until recently the answer in Oak Park was no, but not because they didn’t want to.
“When we opened our doors in April of 2020 we had wanted to do composting from the very beginning. It’s the right thing to do,” said Adrienne Guldin, co-owner of The Daly Bagel.
But it was also the hard thing to do. The cost and logistics of composting is usually more than a small business owner can handle alone.
“It’s a matter of accessibility because it’s hard if you’re just one person doing something and then also the assurance that stuff is actually getting composted,” said Michelle Mascaro, owner of The Happy Apple Pie Shop.
Takeout 25 is trying to change that. The local nonprofit worked to have Oak Park certified as a Green Dining Hub by the Illinois Green Business Program and decided to use that platform to address the composting challenge.
“Early on, we decided that commercial composting is going to be an important part of it. None of the villages around offer commercial composting. It’s residential only,” said Ravi Parakkat, founder of Takeout 25.
To encourage local restaurants to compost, Takeout 25 is offering $500 grants toward the cost.
“It’s a one-time grant for the first 25 restaurants that sign up,” he said.
WasteNot Compost is their partner organization. Founder and CEO Liam Donnelly started the company when he was 15 years old while working in a café. He began taking coffee grounds home to his family’s compost pile.
“My manager offered to start paying me to do it,” Donnelly said. “Getting paid to do something I was already doing and passionate about was exciting.”
Fast forward 11 years.
“There’s demand for composting. People want to do it, but the logistics that go into picking up food waste is pretty difficult. Different from standard municipal solid waste because you’re taking the densest, wettest portion of the waste stream,” he said.
Most of WasteNot’s composting is done within the city limits of Chicago, using an aerobic process. It’s like a backyard compost pile, but at industrial scale.
Through research and development, WasteNot aims to continue to expand what they can accept.
“If the product says compostable, we need to be able to accept it because I don’t want to ever get to a point where it’s similar to the shenanigans that go into the blue bin recycling,” Donnelly said.
By encouraging participation, Takeout 25 has eased some of the burden from individual restaurants.
“The more restaurants that sign up for this, it allows WasteNot plan their routes for collection more effectively and the lower the price point is going to be,” Parakkat explained.
Current prices range from $25 to $50 per week, depending on the nature of the business. Two restaurants have signed up so far: The Happy Apple Pie Shop and The Daly Bagel.
WasteNot Compost picks up organic materials with their fleet of electric trucks. The resulting compost is returned to customers who want it.
“The goal of why we compost is to reduce methane emissions on a large scale,” Donnelly said. “But there’s a secondary motivator, which is the nutrient rich soil amendment that that food waste creates.”
“As we can compost more, we’ll be able to put less in our regular trash dumpster,” Guldin said. “And so, in theory, we will be able to reduce our number of pickups for regular trash. But it’s really about reducing our environmental impact as much as we can.”
Staff training hasn’t been a problem, the two participating restaurant owners said.
“Having a WasteNot come and work on this with us was really important,” Mascaro said. “Staff for everybody is infinitely trainable. If there’s something that comes from food product. It goes in the compost!”
WasteNot Compost and Takeout 25 both work to ensure that compostable containers and packaging is available at an affordable cost to the restaurants.
“Over time we will move the needle and create benefits community wide,” Parakkat said. “It will take time, but we will get there.”
For now, the two business owners involved feel the effort is worthwhile.
“Composting was always sort of there as the dream,” Guldin said. “In the past it was prohibitively expensive, because nobody wanted to do this sort of small-scale composting.”
“Restaurants want to compost,” Donnelly said. “Now, they know that they’re going through a shared experience with their neighboring businesses. It’s a support network. It lowers the barrier to entry.”
At The Happy Apple Pie Shop, Mascaro said, “we have a sign that says we compost. And I think that it makes people happy to know that.”