If you dine at many UK restaurants, one thing you’ll notice immediately is you don’t just have a single rubbish removal bin when you clear your own table. Instead, you may have two or three different kinds of recycle bins and one rubbish removal bin. You’ll see patrons walking up to those who work in these restaurants and asking, “Can I recycle this?” This is a great sign as we are now being reprogrammed as a society to be fully conscious of our waste removal. However, wouldn’t it be nice to see our society move one step further and start asking, “Can I compost this?”
The whole process of recycling is a bit of mystery. Where do the items in the recycling bin go? Do they go to the same place as the items in the rubbish removal bin? Do they REALLY get recycled? What percentage of that stuff in the recycle bin actually gets recycled? You see, we’ve also been trained as a society to be skeptical of things that sound really good and healthy but we can’t actually see. It could be a marketing ploy! We see the bin men empty the recycling bins and we see those big trucks take it away… but we rarely get to see where it actually goes and what actually happens to it.
So, wouldn’t it be nice to see first hand what happens to our rubbish clearance? Wouldn’t it be nice to have compost containers right there behind the restaurants where we could see the food we put in a “compost bin” get recycled through aerobic composting. I for one wouldn’t mind seeing some wiggly worms rummaging through the composted food waste. I would LOVE to see rose bushes blooming fragrant and beautiful in the outside eating area fertilized by the food and garden waste removal compost. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t this be more believable, and ultimately more satisfying, than just seeing our recycling taken away in big trucks? That’s a restaurant I’d go back to over and over again!
The same could be done in school and university cafeterias! Instead of having the reprogramming of these young kid’s minds one what to do with rubbish removal, we could programme them in a much healthier method at a very young age. Why not create lots of school compost, let the kids dig around in it (with gloves) at various stages so they could understand the composting process better, and then grow beautiful garden vegetables in the compost and serve them up in the school cafeteria!
Hey, the easiest way to get a kid to eat a green vegetable is having him or her grow it themselves! It’s like people who don’t really like fish eating fish because they caught the fish themselves. It just tastes better than way. Having the kids make their own compost from cafeteria rubbish removal would make them like that kale they grew in it all the more. It might even become irresistible to take a bite right there in the garden! So much sweeter than supermarket kale!
Of course, you can cut out the “middle man” at home too by showing your own kids how to compost their own kitchen scraps, paper waste, and garden waste in their very own compost pile(s) at home. Get them asking, “Can I compost this Mum?” and “Is it okay to compost this Dad?” You can teach them that composting is a really organic way of recycling! When you get a new batch of compost, plant some cherry tomatoes, bilberries, sunflowers, or other kid friendly edibles! This will really drive the lesson home for life!
Meanwhile, you can teach your kids another incredible and related life lesson too. How and why to make purchasing decisions based on eco-conscious ethics. Instead of sending your rubbish removal off with your council bin men, where it will likely end up in a landfill, call Clearabee for a booking instead. Clearabee recycles, upcycles, or reuses about ninety percent of the rubbish clearance they collect.
If you don’t happen to have a garden or a good place to compost at home, you may want to set aside your food waste and ask Clearabee, “Can you compost this?” Leave it to Clearabee, one of the most ecoconscious companies in the UK, to find a way to do so. In fact, they have ongoing contracts with several restaurants in London so this is very likely already part of their plan.
One reason this works so well is that Clearabee offers a far more flexible service than the local councils give restaurants or private residents. In the summer, when restaurants gett super busy, and hey don’t have enough wheelie bins, or when a resident cleans out their garage, they don’t have to worry about saving their rubbish clearance for the next fortnight.
Remember, “Can I compost this?” is even better than “Can I recycle this” as it cuts out the middle man. It ensures that one hundred percent of the waste removal gets recycled because you can see it with your own eyes. It also doesn’t take more energy to recycle it, other than a small amount of physical labor on your part! In other words, composting is one of the greenest methods of recycling!