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• Reputation: 3 Q&A: 0 0 0 3 0 0 Classifieds: 0 0 what's this? Expert: 1 topic Recycle/Re-Use Follow Following 0 Tom Gannon

  0 0 You're both wrong. Or, you're both right. It's a wee bit nuanced. There is no law stating that restaurants, or "food service establishments (FSEs) must compost all food waste. There is a law on the books saying that there can be no paper, cardboard, or landscape/yard waste in the commercial garbage stream. Food waste does not fall into those categories. However, it is significantly cheaper to have compost service vs similiarly scaled garbage service. There are many options. There are three haulers that currently offer commercial food waste service in Seattle. These are Cedar Grove, Waste Management and Cleanscapes. You can hire any of them to haul your food waste. SPU has a non-exclusive contract with Cleanscapes and it specifies a rate for the service. It works out to be about 33% or so cheaper than a comparably sized garbage container. This is largely because there are no taxes and ancillary fees associated with food service while there are with garbage. Waste Management and Cedar Grove can charge whatever the want, but it, too, tends to be much cheaper than garbage. We have a contract with Cedar Grove to offer training to any customer that signs up with any hauler for food waste service though the other haulers do their own training as well. We offer lots of posters and other materials in at least 7 languages to make the training easier and help it stick. Check out resourceventure.org for more information. SPU also offers a low cost option for smaller generators of foodwaste. If a business only needs up to two 96 gallon containers of food waste dumped weekly they may request that they become part of the residential program. The cost of the residential program is about $7.85 per month for one 96 gallon container picked up once a week. The regular commercial charge would be about $50.00/month for a similiar service. There are some big differences, though. For instance, if you use the residential program than you must make sure that the container is placed within a few feet of the curb for pickup on that neighborhood's pickup day. The commercial service option offers far more flexibility than the residential option can. The landscape changes somewhat on July 1st of this year. Last year SPU banned styrofoam for single use consumer products in FSEs. As of July 1 there is a requirement that those containers be made out a recyclable or compostable material (we prefer compostable) and that if the FSE uses the single use service-ware for their dine-inn guests (as most fast food places do) then that restaurant must offer recycling and/or compost disposal options for their customers. We call this "front of house" while anything that happens in the kitchens is "back of house". This would essentially require that all such restaurants have either recycling service or food waste service. There are about 4500 Dept of Health permits for food service in Seattle held by about 3200 or so restaurants, grocery stores, event facilities, caterers, etc. There are more permits than food service establishments because many have more than one permit. A Safeway may have one for the deli, another for the bakery. Safeco field alone may have 100 of them for all I know... Of these approx. 3200 FSEs about 1650 have signed up for food waste service so we are above 50%. These FSEs are sending about 35,000 tons/year of food to Cedar Grove for processing (I'm awaiting a report now). In 2006 it was virtually 0 so we're doing pretty well. I hope we will be at virtual market saturation within a few years. Tom Gannon answered in Recycle/Re-Use about 1 year ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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