Recycling Fanatic at Work
By Virginia B. Wood, Fri., June 5, 2009
Eastside Cafe co-owner Dorsey Barger readily admits it might never have occurred to her to begin a recycling program when she and Elaine Martin bought Carla's Restaurant in East Austin 21 years ago, if a system had not already been in place. "Carla was already doing some recycling, so we just kept it up," she recalls. In fact, "keeping up" with the established program doesn't even begin to describe the depth of Barger's commitment; she's now a self-described recycling fanatic. "I literally feel bad when I see recyclable things being thrown away – I have to do something."
Eastside Cafe's recycling system is remarkably thorough and starts with staff training at every position. Wait people are taught to sort everything on the trays they bring back to the kitchen: bottles in one container; cans in another; compostable materials such as coffee grounds and tea bags somewhere else; plates, silverware, and glasses in specific places. Every prep cook has a bucket at his/her station for onion skins, vegetable peels, trimmings, eggshells, etc. Those buckets go to the back porch at the end of each shift, and the contents begin a journey through the compost process every morning, eventually enriching Eastside's large organic garden.
The dish crew totes the sorted bottles, cans, and plastics to the recycling bins at the end of the service alley where they will be whisked away to Ecology Action by a small local company called Green Idea Recycling. "We're paying them more than we paid Texas Disposal Systems, but they take more plastics, and that makes it worth it to me," Barger explains. Used cooking oil is picked up regularly by DieselGreen Fuels, and the grease trap solids go to Liquid Environmental Solutions. The office staff shreds used paper, and a worm recycling system in the chicken coop turns it into dirt. Barger acknowledges that asking her fellow restaurateurs to spend more money on recycling in these difficult economic times is a tough sell, but she's willing to discuss her system and share contacts with anyone who's considering it.
Barger's passion for recycling is not limited to Eastside Cafe, however. Her vocal advocacy earned her a new assignment at this year's recent Art City Austin event – Green Team leader. "My partner, Susan Hausmann, has been on the board of that organization for years, and at the planning meetings I would always complain about how the amount of garbage generated at the event was increasing every year," she recalls. Her squeaky-wheel behavior finally paid off this year with the creation of the Green Team and the implementation of the Eastside Cafe Recycling Challenge. Six teams of volunteers from local nonprofits manned water refill and recycling stations at the three-day event for the opportunity to lessen the environmental impact and compete for cash prizes. Volunteers collected garbage and sorted out all of the food scraps. "Texas Disposal Systems composts on such a large scale they were able to take it all – meat, bones, dairy products, everything, which was great," Barger says.
After the event shut down on Sunday evening, the teams had collected nearly 300 units of recycle and compost materials – with each unit weighing about 15 pounds, that amounts to well over 2 tons of refuse that didn't go into the landfill. "It was so much more successful than I could ever have imagined. Even before we were done, the volunteers were coming up with better strategies for next year. The winning team was a group called Homewood Heights Community Gardens, and they used the $1,000 first-prize money to build a garden shed," Barger reports with pride.