Food waste is a big problem for our planet, and anyone who has ever worked in the food industry probably knows firsthand how much waste even well-intentioned business can produce. In Carmel-By-The-Sea, California, however, one fancy restaurant has discovered an innovative and low-lift way to drastically reduce the amount of waste it sends off to landfills, Monterey County Weekly reported.
Anton & Michel, a high-end restaurant where you can order such menu items as Oysters Rockefeller and Housemade Duck Liver Pate, recently invested in a Mill food recycler. The high-tech trash can, which retails for $999, heats, dries, and grinds food scraps into a dirt-like material, turning every 10 pounds of food waste into a mere one pound.
Reducing a restaurant's overall quantity of food waste by 90% is no small thing.
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"When you work in a restaurant, you produce so much waste. You should see our [food] bins, they are overflowing during busy times of the year," Loie Al Nimri, owner of Anton & Michel, told Monterey County Weekly. "It's been amazing. We plan to order four more."
Even better, the resulting material doesn't even smell bad. "It kind of looks like coffee grounds and smells like dried spices, because that's what's left when you take all the water out of food," said Mill PR rep Amanda Plante.
While the material can be thrown away with much lower environmental impact than 10 times as much (wet) food waste, it can also be sent back to Mill, which turns it into chicken feed.
According to nonprofit ReFED, 38% of the 237 million tons in our very inefficient food supply system go unsold or uneaten each year, with the vast majority of that food being shipped off to landfills, where it takes up space and produces planet-overheating air pollution as it decomposes. That makes innovative solutions like Mill's essential.
Mill isn't just for restaurants, either — it was actually designed for home kitchens. While composting is still likely a more useful (and much cheaper) solution, this piece of technology could be worth looking into if composting isn't an option.
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