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.

From “root-to-tip” to blitzing old bread

The World’s 50 Best Bars handed Re its Sustainable Bar Award for 2021 in recognition of its venue-wide focus on reducing waste. The bar’s counter and tables, for instance, are shaped from 82,000 recycled milk bottles.

Three Blue Ducks has saved over 100,000 milk bottles by using a Juggler system, which eliminates the need to store milk in plastic. “All our venues have them,” says co-owner Chris Sorrell, referring to his NSW, Queensland and Victoria eateries. Single O coffee roasters have saved 18 million two-litre milk bottles through the same system.

Lucas Parkinson recalls becoming “really angry at plastic” after visiting pollution-choked Bali. The chef currently works as a hospitality consultant, after closing Ode last year. “By the end of it, we stopped using Glad Wrap,” he says. Instead of sous-vide cooking meat in typical plastic bags, he used beef or venison fat. “We’d call it a fat-vide.”

At Sydney’s hatted Yellow restaurant, Nina ‘Teddie’ Huynh’s “root-to-tip” approach to maximising ingredients means everything from pumpkin seeds to spent strawberries is given a second life. “Fermented tomato skins are great for a dressing; they smell like Prosecco after about a week,” she says.

At Melbourne restaurant Parcs (‘scrap’ spelled backwards), Dennis Yong is cleverly salvaging food waste from its sister venues. “My business partner Adi [Halim] from The Hotel Windsor and Sunda, he was like … ‘why don’t you start solving the food waste problem for our restaurant group?’,” Dennis says. He uses orange peels from the hotel to produce a spicy Japanese condiment, and leftover bread crusts to create a rich bread miso for the signature umami e pepe, a play on traditional cacio e pepe. “There’s enough ingredients to do what you want to do,” he says. “You just have to suck it up already and use what’s already there.” At Melbourne’s Navi, Julian Hills does just that, blitzing old bread into new flour. At Hearth by Moonacres in Bowral, NSW, Sabine Spindler has transformed day-old bread into dumpling batter. “You steam it like gnocchi in boiling water.” It appeared on her Waste Not Tuesday lunch menu.

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.”

Looking to the future of sustainability

It's one of many inspiring examples of sustainable dining you might have noticed. There are venues only serving wild-hunted meat or light-hoofed animals – such as kangaroo – because they have a lower carbon footprint (Pipit and Parcs), while the rise of vegetable-forward menus (like at Yellow, which went vegan during the pandemic) reflects the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recommendation that more people adopt plant-based diets to help fight climate change. Then there’s the uptake in solar energy; the recently-installed panels at Three Blue Ducks’ Byron outpost could power 20 households.

Future Food System’s recent Melbourne experiment – a dining space where all food was produced on-site – was a sign of what’s possible. “They were farming barramundi and using that wastewater to feed the plants,” says Chris Sorrell, who dined there. “It’s incredible to think you can have a closed system like that, where the fish feed the plants and the plants provide clean water for the fish.” It’s the kind of progressive thinking needed, given the IPCC’s recent “code red for humanity” warnings. “We need a radical change,” says Dennis Yong. “We’re running out of time.”

Chefs are pioneering this change because they work closely with people who grow our food, which makes it “so much harder to waste anything”, says Sabine Spindler. “What a great thing that is for us, to relate to people and know it’s their hard work that goes into the stuff that we are honoured to treat and put on our plates.” And by supporting a sustainable approach to dining, you’re paying tribute to their work – and the planet, too.

By Lee Tran Lam