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This year marks the 50th anniversary of South Side landmark Hodak’s, home to “love, peace, and chicken grease,” as they say around the corner of Gravois and McNair avenues. It’s staggering to think about all the fried chicken Hodak’s plates up -- 17,000 pounds of poultry a week, according to owner Charlene Hegel (at left).
It’s just as wild to contemplate where all those chicken bones left on the plates of satisfied diners end up going. Now, we know this may sound a mite yucky, but stay with us here. Garbage can basically go two places: into a landfill, or to some sort of recycling or composting center. If it’s organic, like a chicken bone (or a pineapple), it can be composted.
Most restaurant owners have not yet seen the light. They don’t get that they can avoid stuffing a landfill with trash that stays there forever by composting instead. Maybe they don’t know how easy it is. Maybe they don’t know how inexpensive – and often, cheaper than using trash dumpsters, even – it is.
Maybe they don’t know what the affable Hegel knows, and what we learned together, when she and I followed a chicken bone from plate to fertilizer.
Harry Cohen (at right, manning the bin washer) grew up with garbage. His family business has been the waste business for 25 years. (And that’s not “waste management,” for all you Sopranos fans, by the way.) Some time ago, he moved from Buffalo, NY, to St. Louis, and moved his recycling and composting business, Blue Skies Recycling, into a 10,000-square-foot facility in the industrial zone near Grand Boulevard at Chouteau Avenue.
Cohen’s family used to manage landfills, but now he schools business owners to help them get as close as possible to “zero waste.” That may sound almost like a plane of existence in a sci-fi nether-realm, but it is a genuine goal for Cohen’s club of clients – to recycle and compost everything one possibly can, leaving nothing for the garbage collector but the curb.
Hegel said that in a single year, Hodak’s, in conjunction with Blue Skies, has reached the 85-90% recycling level. In other words, just 10-15% of the waste that the eatery produces winds up in a dumpster these days. Technically, it’s two three-yard dumpsters, down from a dozen eight-yard dumpsters a year ago. Each week, Hodak’s is composting 5,500 lbs. of crumbs from the bottom of fryers, chicken-prep trimmings, lettuce pieces, used napkins, tomato cores, and, of course, chicken bones. At a restaurant that epitomizes tradition, that’s a sea change.
Hodaks' compostables, like those of all Blue Skies’ clients, go into happy-yellow plastic bins. The weighty bins are collected by drivers who ferry them in trucks to Blue Skies. At Blue Skies, you can open the bins, and find our lonely chicken bone, along with quite a few surprises.
The food in the bins does not always look nasty. Sometimes, it looks remarkably fresh, like there’s no good reason for it to be here. This stuff could be eaten – in fact, it could be diverted to the kitchens at homeless shelters. Cohen says that plenty of restaurants and institutions do send their edible “leftovers” to places like Operation Food Search.
Still, the yellow bins may be hinged open to reveal a veritable farmers’ market of fresh-seeming foods. Yellow, red, and green peppers (above right) look ready to be grilled and stuffed into fajitas. Watermelons cry out for a picnic that won’t happen. Stale doughnuts (above right) could become… well, actually, stale doughnuts can’t do anything except become compost, but they look unmolested and edible, anyway. (Doughnuts! Noooooo!!)
So much of this compost-to-be signifies waste. The larger the institution, generally speaking, the more waste it produces. Blue Skies handles dead food from businesses large and small, and to see tons of prepped and wasted food confers a certain hollow feeling. We’re not exactly doing this wrong, but we’re not exactly doing it right, either. What’s even better than compost? Not using food in the first place that’s only going to go to waste. Composting is the best penance for the sin of scraping pounds of uneaten food off from a buffet or a doughnut case in the first world, where we will always make so much more than we need.
Cohen trains business owners and their employees to put the compostables, recyclables, and garbage in the respective color-coded bins Blue Skies provides. It’s not a single day of training. It’s simple to learn, but, Cohen finds, businesses need occasional re-training when the bins start showing up with the wrong contents.
Restaurant owners sometimes start the process by hooking up with St. Louis Earth Day’s Green Dining Alliance program. Those curious about composting take a field trip with Cohen to a restaurant that’s already using Blue Skies.
Our chicken bone, like all the compostables at Blue Skies, is dumped into the big, yellow wet compactor (below). There, it may join organic waste generated by the likes of the Energizer corporate cafeteria, local florists, Schnucks stores, Busch Stadium, Blue Sky restaurant (appropriately), Crushed Red, Slow Food St. Louis events, Sauce Magazine’s Food Truck Fridays, the Picnic Basket Café at the Magic House, the Schlafly Tap Room, high school cafeterias, The Cakery, Cafe Provencal, the Ritz-Carlton, River City Casino, Amigos Cantina, Something Elegant Catering, Hollyberry Catering, Vin de Set, R.T. Weiler's, Rio Syrups, and the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Sassafras Cafe.
A bunch of the St. Louis Originals restaurants number among his clients, Cohen said.
Another big client: Washington University. “At most universities, composting is a natural,” Cohen added. “This generation is demanding sustainability.”
Blue Skies is handling 80 tons of organic waste a week, said Cohen -- and the business is growing crazy-fast, too. The big news is that he’s getting prepped to franchise the operation.
After being compacted, our chicken bone and its biodegradable buddies wind up on a specialized transport truck. Their funeral cortege will take them just over the River to Belleville farm country, to St. Louis Composting.
( Editor's Note: Exactly what happens after that? The second installment of this two-part series will be published in this space tomorrow.)
