Waste is a human problem. No other species on Earth wastes things. Collectively, we throw away almost 50% of all food either before or after it reaches consumers. This is due to the open-loop food waste system: food is produced, distributed, sold, eaten, then thrown away, resulting in mass waste (at the landfill, about 25% of the waste is food). Our expectations and desires are unsustainable, particularly in the west. We need a new food system. We opened the loop when we created the landfill. Now it’s time to close it.
A closed-loop food system is actually relatively simple when you think about it. Everything used serves a purpose, meaning organic matter and its nutrients are returned to the soil via gardening and composting. Non-organic matter is recycled or repurposed. This is nothing revolutionary in the context of history. For instance, all pre-industrial eateries would have used closed-loop systems.
Douglas McMaster created the world’s first 100% zero waste restaurant in 2014, Silo - a restaurant without a bin. As Douglas puts it, “Waste is just a failure of the imagination. We designed waste into this world, which makes it our responsibility to design it out again”. What this means practically is that Silo pioneered a closed-loop system that had never been done before. Suppliers bring food directly to the door, eliminating the need for food packaging. Excess ingredients are preserved or pickled for sauces, broths and much more. The kitchen aims to maximise resources and minimise waste. Waste that does occur is composted and returned to the soil, closing the loop.
It’s not just restaurants that are working towards zero-waste in hospitality, bars are now entering the equation too. Veteran bartenders and co-founders Agung Prabowo and Roman Ghale opened Penicillin in 2019, describing it as Hong Kong’s first “closed-loop bar”. And culture plays a big role in how easy or hard it is to implement a successful close-loop system. Hong Kong isn’t the easiest place to start a green business; it has a culture of convenience that is creating a sustainability crisis. For the team at Penicillin, the goal is to turn single-use culture on its head, and the team is constantly looking for new ways to reuse, recycle and minimise waste. Lemons, for instance, are squeezed for their juices, and the remaining pulp, seeds and skin are separated to be brewed into sparkling lemon “wine” in the bar’s fermentation room, or dried for cocktail garnishes. It’s not just the drinks, sustainability has been built into the foundations of the bar with furniture and fittings made locally from recycled materials. Trees uprooted during the 2018 typhoon Mangkhut have been turned into tables and finished with recycled aluminium soda cans, while the LED wall lights are rescued tubes from Hong Kong’s iconic neon street signs. Every detail, from the recycled-paper business cards to the custom-made recycled-cotton uniforms, has been carefully considered. The goal is to get as close to zero waste as possible.
The past two hundred years have been an evolution of waste. We’ve been hard-wired to accept waste as an inevitability. We feel good about recycling, but don’t question landfill. But people weren’t always wasteful... We had to be convinced that it was worth it to throw things away, and companies had to work really hard to make it cheaper to incentivise people to buy, use, chuck and repeat. Fixing the food waste problem is not an impossible task. It’s about looking backwards to look forward. It doesn’t require high tech innovations. All we need is awareness of what causes food waste and an understanding of how we can change the way we eat. We have all the answers, now we need to act.
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