As you enjoy a dish at a restaurant or sip on a cocktail, you’re probably not thinking about the bin. But the venue’s rubbish heap – and minimising what ends up there – has inspired many clever sustainability efforts in hospitality.

At Ode restaurant in Wanaka, New Zealand, Lucas Parkinson would save compostable scraps for the ‘chicken’ bin, which fed his supplier’s poultry. “So our produce went through a chicken and came back to us as an egg, which I thought was really cool,” he says.

The rubbish at Sydney’s Re tells a story, too: there’s a notebook by the bar’s general waste and compost bins. “You make daily notes and it goes into the night report, which goes out to every member of staff,” owner Matt Whiley says. It’s easier to adapt a kangaroo tartare that diners struggle to finish, for example, if you’re observing which dishes return unfinished.

Community-led change

For Sabine, working directly with Moonacres’ farm – where soil changes can give cabbage a mustardy flavour and the produce is ultra-local – was “the next step forward” after her time at Sydney’s ethical and sustainable Cornersmith eateries. Their bartering system cleverly allowed locals to swap excess backyard crops for food or coffee. Matt Whiley has a hospitality-focused version in play at Re, where he repurposes leftover cake, bread and whey from other venues into inventive cocktails. It is proposed that, in the future, a system will alert other eateries to excess food in their area so they can do something similar.

Melbourne’s Fenton Food & Wine also takes a community-led approach to being green, with co-owner Nesbert Kagonda drawing on his upbringing in Zimbabwe. “The whole culture in Zimbabwe was very collective,” he says. “I wanted to create this accessible farm-to-table space, which allowed the community to come down to the farm and grow with us, but would also allow them to come down with their friends to enjoy that meal of what they’d grown.”

By Lee Tran Lam