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Recyclers take refuge in restaurants’ trash
By Kathleen Dayton
Staff Writer
It’s messy, it takes up space, and it stinks. But garbage has kept one man in business for 15 years and has even opened up manufacturing opportunities.
Chris Fisher, owner of Fisher Recycling, picks up the area’s recyclable trash, including glass, plastic, aluminum and tin, and hauls it off to his recycling center on the former Charleston Naval Base. There, he recreates the materials into useful and profitable items such as floors, countertops, shower stalls, vessel sinks and landscape glass, used as decorative mulch.
“You put it on top of plants and it lets the water go through,“ Fisher said. “It’s all pulverized
and marbleized so there aren’t any sharp edges.”
Fisher’s recycling center uses a glass separating machine that can make seven different products from one bottle, including fine sandblast and three-eighths-inch marble.
Fisher runs the company with his wife, Elizabeth, and seven employees. He expects to grow the company and find new products he can make from Charleston trash. And the growing trend is picking up tons of refuse from some of the area’s restaurants.
“It’s in the millions of pounds,” Fisher said. “The manufacturing end of the business is a growth segment and will be much, much bigger in a couple of years. It’s gone crazy in the last year. Everybody’s starting to recycle.”
Fisher got the idea for his business after noticing that some friends who operated T-Bonz restaurants had started recycling. It was the early 1980s, before recycling became more mainstream.
“It was unusual, especially in South Carolina,” Fisher said. “They were being really responsible with their waste. They were recycling every day, and I saw a niche in there and just asked them if I could come and take it away for them.”
David Miller, an operating partner with T-Bonz, said the restaurant’s early recycling efforts were prompted by its workers.
“We had an employee who asked us, why don’t we recycle?” Miller said “It just made perfect sense. It was employee-driven, so that made it really easy. They embrace it, they drive it and that’s what makes it a really good program. It costs money, but it does reduce your impact fees. You can reduce the number of time you get trash service each week.
Everything costs you money, but it’s the right thing to do.”
A number of downtown restaurant owners have recently begun to take the lead in recycling efforts, whether they are using a service such as Fisher’s or hauling trash to recycling centers themselves.
David Szlam, chef and partner at Cordavi at 14 Market St., said he and his employees are recycling glassware and paper and taking it to the city’s recycling center themselves. There isn’t enough storage space to stockpile cardboard, but Szlam hopes to find a solution to the problem soon.
“We do have space to store glass, so we won’t make too much waste in the trash dumps,” Szlam said.
Szlam spent some time as a chef in San Francisco, where he said most everything except food was separated and recycled.
“The only thing that was really going into the trash cans was food, which is really biodegradable,” Szlam said. “We have to worry about the environment and what we do to it. I don’t want to go to bed at night knowing I didn’t help the situation.”
Individual homes produce a much smaller percent of recyclable trash than a restaurant generates, Szlam said.
“Big restaurants like Hank’s or The Boathouse, they’ll do anywhere from 300 to 400 people a night,” he said. “They could go through 150 bottles of wine alone.”
Chip Roberts, partner and co-owner of the Kickin’ Chicken, said recycling efforts make everyone in the restaurant feel good.
“You’re used to seeing all that trash going out,” he said. “At least it’s going somewhere. All those beer bottles and stuff that you know can be recycled…it’s gross to see the amount of stuff that goes in the trash can. Either you’re going to have to pay somebody or haul it yourself to the recycling center. It’s like any other business decision you make, but you feel an obligation to the city and the environment to do the right thing as best you can.”
Roberts figures it costs his group more than $10,000 a year for the recycling service at its four restaurants, he said.
“I won’t say the $10,000 doesn’t matter, but it was more important that we did the right thing,” Roberts said.
Ciaran Duffy, executive chef at Tristan on South Market Street, said he would love to join in the recycling efforts, but he doesn’t have enough space to contain trash unless it could be picked up on a daily basis.
“Asking people to put three or four days’ worth of cardboard in their building is just not feasible for most people downtown,” Duffy said. “I can’t keep a week’s worth of cardboard in here because it would be coming out the doors.”
Scott Long, president of the Charleston Restaurant Association, said rents per square foot are so expensive downtown that using space to store recyclables isn’t feasible for many restaurants.
“If the city would pick it up on a daily basis, or even on a two-day basis, I think it would work, but I don’t think any of the restaurants have the space to hold more than two days’ worth of bottles,” Long said.
Laura Cabiness, director of the public service department for the city of Charleston, said the city would like to see as many businesses recycling as possible and is currently studying options to find ways to promote it. Using private companies such as Fisher’s is an existing option, and Charleston County currently provides curbside pickup to offices on their residential route on a bi-weekly basis.
“One possibility is to work with the county to see if they can expand their services to meet this need,” Cabiness said. “The city is also in the midst of studying its ability to augment the service provided by the county with additional commercial recycling in high-demand areas.”
For Mike Lata, chef and co-owner of Fig restaurant, recycling is about taking pride in the restaurant community. Fig has been using Fisher Recycling for six months.
“It became very important to me as a business owner,” Lata said. “And it’s worth it to our employees. They’re glad that we do it. It’s not about making the dollar. The expense is not that great, even for a small business like ours, and it’s worth it for us for this to be the way we conduct our business.”
As establishments like Lata’s generate more trash, Fisher will find more things to do with it. He recently began offering restaurants curbside pickup of old cooking grease.
“We turn it into our own biodiesel operation,” Fisher said. “It only goes into our vehicles. We have our own gas station.”
Kathleen Dayton is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at kdayton@charlestonbusiness.com.
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