This restaurant runs with no trash cans. ‘It’s the right thing to do’ – but what if it weren’t?
Catering to their own interests, local residents’ trash can be seen as the food scraps of the nation. But the people they serve may not feel the same way.
One would expect that serving people who are less well off would be a challenge.
You’d think that a family of four living on $1 a day would end up spending more than $20 a month on food.
But no, they’d have a $2.50 meal.
That’s because the man who manages the restaurant, a regular customer, has not allowed the restaurant to compost its food waste.
In fact, the restaurant’s owner has told the woman who handles recycling, composting, and garbage disposal to throw away their own.
And she has done just that until recently.
Trouble in paradise?
The owner of the restaurant, who did not want to be named, was shocked that the woman threw out food for free and charged him $2.50 to dispose of it.
“I was shocked,” he says. “The owner told me it’s the best way to keep the restaurant in business; that if they compost they won’t have to charge me for garbage disposal and that if they throw it, it will be cheaper for the municipality.”
“At first, I thought it would be cheaper to dump it with the garbage and then compost it myself,” he says.
Instead, he paid the woman he owed money, and kept the $2.50.
“He took it and said ‘Do with it what you wish,'” says Angela Fyfe, who is in charge of the restaurant.
“He has no idea what impact it has on the community and on the people who eat there,” she says of the practice, which does not, in fact, keep the restaurant going.
“In some cases, we’ve had people arrive late for their meals and leave without paying,” she says. “They tell us they don’t have enough
