“We’re a medium sized business, so when we’re helping with rubbish and getting rid of bins and prepping and throwing out food scraps and stuff… it does kind of weigh on your conscience a bit. Then there’s the business element because obviously every skip bin costs you money, every pick up costs money. So we need to be looking at it from a perspective of ‘how is there a potential way to save money’, or at least direct that money into better ways because we’re paying for the waste anyway, so why not do it smarter?” Welsh concedes in hospitality, there will always be an element of waste given the nature of the industry. However, Stillwater looks at every measure to reduce the impacts. The restaurant saves frying oil for a local who turns it into biodiesel, while it also uses Golden Brown for collection and a local community garden composting of coffee grounds. “For the hospitality industry, there’s not like this ready pack of what you can do to reduce or make it more circular, so it did take a fair bit of effort for us to put things in place,” says Welsh. “If something comes across our desk, we jump at it, like the Golden Brown project. That local business comes in and picks up our coffee grounds, and that goes into a compost/soil project. As soon as we saw that pop up on socials we thought we’ll get involved in, but it’s not like it was something that we knew could exist or would have existed before, if that makes sense.”
some instances the grower will ‘grow to order’, while some producers have previously been a part of taking scraps back to their farm. The kitchen will use available produce to design their menu and portions are carefully considered to minimise waste and meat bones and scrap are turned into stock where possible. “We’ve always been quite aware and it’s a topic we’re fairly conscious of… particularly for those of us that have young children and thinking about the future,” Welsh says.
“We’ve always been quite aware and it [waste] is a topic we’re fairly conscious of... particularly for those of us that have young children and thinking about the future.” -BIANCA WELSH
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