What is left after prevention and after feeding people is material: peelings, trimmings, bones, shells, coffee grounds, packaging and oil. This topic is about where it actually goes — which is a different question from where you put it, and the gap between those two is where most restaurant recycling quietly stops meaning anything.
🚚 Follow your own bin
Start with the uncomfortable exercise: find out what happens to your recycling after it leaves the building. Ask your collector directly — which streams they take, whether they are processed separately, and what makes a load get rejected. Then, if you can, watch a collection.
Restaurants routinely discover one of three things. Everything goes into the same truck, in which case your separation is theatre and it is better to know. Or the streams are genuinely separate, in which case contamination is the thing to work on. Or organic waste is collected separately and nobody in the building knew, which is the happiest and more common than you would expect.
This matters more here than in a home because of contamination: a load of recycling with food in it can be rejected entirely, which means the careful separation of nine bins is undone by the tenth. That is also the honest answer to the compostable packaging question from the first course of this group — the object only becomes compost if there is a stream that takes it, and your collector is the only person who can tell you whether there is.
🗑️ Separation that survives a Friday
Assuming the streams exist, the design problem is making separation happen correctly when the kitchen is at full speed and nobody is thinking about bins at all.
- Put the bin where the waste is made. A separate bin two metres away is used; one at the other end of the kitchen is not. This is the layout argument from the kitchen course, applied to rubbish.
- Fewer streams, done properly. Three bins that are always right beat six that are usually wrong, and the rejected load costs more than the extra sorting would have gained.
- Label with pictures, not words, at eye level, in the languages your kitchen actually speaks.
- Different shapes or colours so the right bin is identifiable without reading anything at eleven at night.
- Check the bins during the close, as a line on the closing checklist. Two minutes, and it is the only feedback anybody gets.
- Tell the team what happened, including when a load was rejected. Nothing kills separation faster than a rumour that it all goes in the same truck — and nothing sustains it better than knowing it does not.
And measure it the way this course measures everything: the point of separating is that less goes to landfill, so the number that matters is the general waste bin getting smaller, not the recycling bin getting fuller.
🌱 Composting, honestly
The trim, peelings and coffee grounds are the largest organic stream and the one with the clearest destination. There are three ways it can go, and only two of them are realistic for a fifty-seat restaurant.
Municipal or commercial collection is the version that works when it exists: a separate bin, collected, processed somewhere with the equipment to do it. If your area offers it, take it — it is the whole answer and it needs nothing from you except correct separation.
A local arrangement is the version most small restaurants end up with: a nearby grower, a community garden, an allotment, a farmer who already collects from somebody else. These work well, they cost nothing, and they depend entirely on one relationship — so the same rules as the donation partner apply: fixed times, agreed containers, one named person.
Composting on site is romantic and rarely right for a restaurant. A kitchen produces more organic waste than a small composter can process, it produces cooked food and meat that ordinary composting cannot take, and it is in a food premises where pests are not a nuisance but a health failure — which is the health inspection course's territory and is not a risk worth taking for thirty kilos a month. Where it does work is on a small scale for specific material — coffee grounds, vegetable peelings only — with somebody who genuinely knows how to run it.
Whatever the route, the food safety line from the previous topic still applies: organic waste is stored covered, away from food, emptied often, and it is one of the first things an inspector looks at.
🛢️ The oil, and the other specific streams
Used cooking oil is the easiest win in this entire course because it is already worth something to somebody. Collectors take it free or pay for it, it becomes fuel or feed, and the alternative — down a drain — is the fastest way to a blocked drain and a very expensive call-out, which the first course of this group already warned about.
The example restaurant changes around twenty litres a week, so something like 85 litres a month leaves as used oil. That is a scheduled collection, a sealed container, and a note in the maintenance calendar. And it pairs with the kitchen course's instruction to filter the oil daily, which extends its life: the two practices together mean less oil bought and the same amount collected properly.
Three other streams are worth a line each. Glass, which in a restaurant with a bar is the heaviest thing you throw away and is usually collected separately. Cardboard, which arrives with every delivery, and which is only recyclable if it is dry and clean — flattened and kept out of the rain. And the grease trap, which is not waste you can do much with, but which is on the same maintenance calendar and fails in the same expensive way when it is ignored.