I’m feeling troubled this month and I’m not sure what to do about it. As a small business owner, I try to make good decisions and be conscious about how I run my business. Conscious about how we take care of guests, mindful about how I take care of my employees and attentive to how what we do affects our environment. 

I’ve been on a quest for the past year to REMOVE SINGLE-USE PLASTICS from our restaurants. I thought this would be pretty easy! Get rid of straws, use compostable soup containers and make a bigger effort to guide people to recycle when possible. Sadly, this has been an exercise in how naive I still am about what it takes to save the planet. 

My first step was to remove plastic straws. Check! Step two, was to stock compostable containers for our delicious, hot soups. We consulted with a company, and designed super cute to-go containers. It literally doubled our disposable cost, but it was worth it in the name of planet saving.  Unfortunately, I ran into several issues. Most importantly, the compostable world still has not come up with a strong solution for really hot soup. Guests would buy our soups, and if they had more than one container, there seemed to be a spillage issue that never happened with our plastic quarts and bowls.

Also, the more I investigate about composting, I started to learn, that once the container leaves the restaurant, there is a really small chance the customer is actually going to compost it. But if you put a compostable item in the recycling, it does not decompose and it ends up forcing that bag of recycling to go into a landfill. Also, if you just toss it into the regular trash, it doesn’t decompose any faster. It HAS to be with compostable matter.

So, what’s a girl to do? I’m trying to do my part. We recycle and compost at each of our restaurants. This is an added cost that we are willing to pay to be responsible to the environment. Check out our stats in the image above from CompostNow on how we did last year. Amazing, right? The sad news is that composting isn’t even available in Roswell, at our newest location. So, this means we are spending the money for compostables and there is no way to compost them! It’s more than frustrating.

Long story, short…we’re trying. The compostable company has gone back to the drawing board to make us a better container, but until then, we went back to BPA-free plastic. So this is where you come in. My request is that each of you

1. at least START to think about the trash we throw away. Even just recycling cans and plastic and making sure they go in the proper bin is a start.

2. You can also bring your own containers into our restaurant and we will fill them. We’re not really supposed to according to the health code, but we’ll do it until someone tells me to stop.

Together we can do better to save the planet.