Cost of eco-friendly practices, proliferation of plastic add hurdles to reopening restaurants

Before COVID-19 struck, West-bourne, a vegetarian café in SoHo, was focused on two things: serving its roughly 250 guests per day and making sure that 14 hours of service generated, on average, only a single landfill-bound bag of trash.

Because of limited street frontage, West-bourne is not attempting to resume service with outdoor seating. Since March the deluge of dine-in guests has been replaced by a trickle of customers picking up pantry goods and bottles of natural wine.

Founder Camilla Marcus remains as committed as ever, however, to the restaurant’s zero-waste goal. 

“For us, zero waste is in our DNA, so we’ll figure out how to do it whatever we’re doing,” said Marcus, who opened the café in January 2018. Just before the shutdown, it became New York’s first zero-waste restaurant, as affirmed by Green Business Certification, an organization that awards LEED green-building certifications. The process involved meticulously documenting that the restaurant diverted at least 90 percent of its waste from landfills.

West-bourne is one of a number of New York restaurants and bars that have, in the past few years, worked to radically reduce the amount of waste they send to landfills. Tactics include careful, creative menu planning to use up excess ingredients, composting, arranging to have deliveries from distributors made via cargo bike and opting not to offer takeout, which typically involves single-use containers that restaurants can only hope are being composted or recycled.

Estimates vary, but according to nonprofit ReFED, the U.S. restaurant industry generates 11.4 million tons of food waste annually. And then there’s all the other trash: plastic wrap, paper napkins, stained menus, disposable packaging, takeout containers and items that are recyclable in theory but not really in practice, such as berry containers and waxed cardboard. 

COVID-19, which has dealt a blow to the city’s restaurants, made adhering to sustainable practices more difficult in many respects. But restaurateurs say they’re finding ways to continue their environmental mission, even as they’ve changed their entire business model in the past few months.

Before the shutdown, Rhodora, a restaurant and natural-wine bar in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, had been slowly adding to the pared-down menu of seafood and pickled vegetables it had opened with in September as it built a network of suppliers that met its strict, no-waste specifications.

“We originally wanted to go with a cheese distributor, but we realized there was no way to do it without a lot of plastic packaging,” owner Henry Rich said. “We ended up going directly to a farm, but they only had cows. Then we met someone who had a goat farm.” 

When the pandemic hit the city, Rhodora closed its kitchen as it worked out how to reopen safely without cutting corners on its principles. Challenges included the temporary shutdown of Brooklyn Grange, the rooftop farm where the restaurant sent its compost.

That situation was easily solved: Rhodora, which belongs to the Oberon Group, quickly determined its recycling hauler could take the compost to a farm upstate. 

The restaurant began to sell community-supported agriculture boxes, meanwhile, to generate income, help suppliers and provide a community service, all with minimal packaging. 

Prepared food, however, created a dilemma. In light of the city’s decision to eliminate its composting program, Rhodora decided to go with reusable containers such as glass jars and recyclable packaging. The restaurant also started offering composting for the community—sending customers’ compost upstate with its own, at its parent company’s expense — a service that has received a plethora of requests since it launched last month.

“Is it more expensive to be sustainable? Yes,” Rich said. “But the ethical implications of going back to contributing 25 percent to global warming? I’d rather close than do that.”

Nevertheless, some sustainable practices have been indefinitely suspended. Reusable cups, which were warmly welcomed at coffee shops before the pandemic, are now widely shunned. And fast-casual chain Dig Inn, which last year launched a reusable to-go container program at its Washington Square Park location, has put the effort on hold.

Pre-existing challenges remain as well.

Baldor Specialty Foods, a wholesale grocer in the Bronx, nimbly pivoted to offering home delivery when the pandemic took hold. The company says its numerous sustainability initiatives, such as sending organic waste from prepared foods to Wilenta Feed in Secaucus, N.J., where it’s made into poultry feed, have not been affected. 

Sustainable packaging, however, is still a dream. And it might remain one for some time. 

“Plastic packaging is hard to get away from,” said Thomas McQuillan, Baldor’s vice president of strategy, culture and sustainability, who hopes suppliers will adopt a system of reusable plastic crates in the future. Right now, though, plastic and waxed cardboard are still the primary vessels Baldor’s shipments arrive in and, therefore, are sent out in. 

Cost is another big issue. Throwing less inventory into the trash definitely saves money, noted Christina Grace, chief executive and founder of the Foodprint Group, a consultancy that helps restaurants reduce waste. But many sustainable practices do cost more, particularly in the short term, and New York restaurants have notoriously tight margins, especially now.

“The food-distribution economy runs on plastic,” said Rhodora’s Rich. “If you are going to opt out of that system, it’s more difficult.” 

Hauling compost also can be more costly than hauling garbage, largely because — as with a lot of sustainable practices — only certain vendors do it. But, as restaurateurs emphasized, there are huge costs, even if they’re not yet externalized, to sending trash to a landfill. 

“Tackling waste and building a more sustainable food system is more pressing than ever,” Grace said. “Climate change and COVID are related, with unsustainable livestock practices being a major cause of both.”

The government plays a huge role in determining costs, through subsidies and regulation, Marcus pointed out, and could incentivize sustainable practices rather than unsustainable ones. And what better time than now to embrace change?

“So much waste comes down to incentive, structuring, access,” Marcus said. “If restaurants are being asked to totally rethink their industries, the city can too.”