Betty’s Family of Restaurants owner Liz Lessner has a dream that was borne out of 10 years of frustration waiting on someone else to get it done.
“I finally just said, ‘Let’s just be the powers that be because we can’t get this done any other way,’” she said.
The dream, said Lessner, is turning the tons of waste from Central Ohio’s restaurants into something useable like, say, compost. Easy enough. There are lots of places that will accept restaurant’s recyclable materials like food scraps and compost. The problem is that there’s no one to haul it. Enter Lessner.
If all goes according to plan, she and her earth-friendly composting partner, Mike Minnix, will open a 30,000-square-foot storage facility in Franklinton by August that employs 20 to 50 people and utilizes trucks that run on restaurant grease to pick up paper, glass, plastic and other recyclables, including food scraps, from Downtown restaurants and transport it to a state-of-the-art composting facility on the city’s south end or, in the case of food scraps, to surrounding farms.
Her goal, Lessner said, is to make her first restaurant—Betty’s Fine Food & Spirits—100 percent waste-free by 2011.
There’s just one small glitch: She hasn’t gotten the green light from SWACO yet.
“They have to get approval from us,” said John Remy, spokesman for the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, upon first hearing the news.
“We’re all for recycling and waste reduction,” he said, adding that a portion of SWACO’s income comes from its environmentally friendly Green Energy Center, where methane from the county landfill is collected and sold, as well as used to make compressed natural gas that runs 12 of their fleet vehicles. The major source of its funding, however, comes from tipping fees associated with filling the Franklin County Sanitary Landfill. “But we were given the power to implement rules and one of the rules says that anyone who sets up a transfer site has to meet our site criteria and get approval from staff and trustees.”
Thus far, Lessner hasn’t done that.
The Ohio legislature passed a law in 1989 that said every county must belong to a waste management authority. The move was intended to help coordinate waste disposal and management in Ohio, in addition to enforcing environmental requirements of waste haulers, businesses and other entities.
As to whether or not SWACO would approve Lessner’s new project, Remy said it’s not up to him.
“That’s not for me to say or for me to decide. As I said before, we encourage recycling and we’re all about waste reduction. That’s our job,” said Remy. “But to do it right, in terms of making sure everything is as it should be, they have to come to us.”
Lessner she said hopes SWACO will see the wisdom in her partnership with Minnix under the new business name Eartha Limited. Minnix originally started Eartha as an environmental consulting company after helping his then-employer, Concessions by Cox, an event planning company, secure food and beverage contracts for events and VIP catering at the Ohio State Fair and the Super Bowl for the last two years based on his green concepts. Minnix’s job was to make sure the company’s efforts were as green as possible by incorporating bioproducts and recycling into the way concessions were handled.
“I looked at the need for a better way to waste haul,” he said of his efforts, which currently are being modeled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for national large-scale events. “There’s a lot being put in a landfill that doesn’t need to be.”
Minnix, who served in the U.S. Navy for five years and is “taking a break” from the Ohio State University environmental policy program, said what makes his endeavor with Lessner unique is that it focuses specifically on restaurants and food service providers, such as schools, nursing homes and hotels, as well as collection of compost and food scrap materials, which isn’t being done in Franklin County or the city of Columbus.
According to Columbus Public Service spokesman Rick Tilton, the city of Columbus only provides waste collection for 327,000 residential households. And 227,000 single family homes receive yard-waste collection service.
“(We’re serving) a niche market,” said Minnix, adding that he and Lessner are positioning themselves and Columbus as a leader in the next energy revolution—anaerobic digesters that could eventually fuel power plants.
“It’s coming in the next couple years and Ohio is leading the way,” he said. “We want to be the first on the scene. We’re offering sustainable hauling where it wasn’t offered before.”
The Kurtz Brothers, Inc. and Quasar Energy Group, a subsidiary of Kurtz Brothers, are on the leading edge of that movement locally, having secured land on the south end, where they’re currently building an anaerobic digester system at Jackson Pike.
SWACO leases that land from the city of Columbus and, in turn, subleased it to Kurtz, said Remy.
According to Kurtz’s website, the anaerobic digester will process the very compost and food remnant materials from the city of Columbus that Lessner and Minnix are proposing to haul. The company’s site said it will convert the food and yard materials into at least “40,000 tons of compost a year.” The website reported that Kurtz would then “convert the compost’s bio-gas into natural gas or electricity” creating enough “to power 400 to 500 homes.”
The biggest need in making that effort go, however, is getting the waste products to the anaerobic digester. That’s the niche Lessner and Minnix hope to fill.
Lessner said the response from Downtown restaurants has been overwhelmingly positive thus far—though she couldn’t name names due to waste contracts that might have to be broken.
“People are dying to compost. People want to do the right thing. But there are no haulers and customer service (from some of the current waste haulers) is atrocious,” Lessner said, adding, “People can’t wait to get on board.”
Lessner said she understands that there are permits she’ll possibly have to acquire from the Franklin County Health Department and Columbus Public Health and she’s prepared for that. She’s also prepared to be a friendly neighbor to Franklinton residents—she and Minnix have the blessing of Franklinton Development Association director Jim Sweeney—by controlling smell through charcoal-lined containers and getting composting material off the premises daily to either adjacent farmers for feeding their hogs or to composting facilities. No composting will be done on-site.
All that’s left now, she said, is the hope that SWACO “will want to see a progressive plan to get food waste out of landfills.”
“If the goal is to reduce, reuse and recycle, then I think we and SWACO are on the same page,” she said.
Remy said there’s no timeline for the approval process—only that Lessner and Minnix must contact SWACO to get the process for approval started.
By Jessie Tigges, August 2010
As the brains behind Eartha Limited, Mike Minnix knows that being environmentally responsible should be operationally and economically viable.
By focusing on the restaurant industry, where 90 percent of waste is reusable, Minnix found an opportunity to have a substantial ecological impact while helping small businesses with their bottom line.
"We're not in it to make a billion dollars. We're in it to pass these costs on to our customers. They're doing the right thing by wanting to compost, by wanting to recycle," Minnix said.
Eartha's business plan has a three-pronged approach - consulting with restaurants to develop an eco-friendly strategy, helping them integrate affordable biodegradable products, and hauling away food scraps and recyclables - that makes being green both cost-effective and feasible.
Once Eartha receives approval from the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio - which Minnix expects any day now - the company can begin hauling away recyclables and food scraps from restaurants using trucks that run on used vegetable oil.
The recyclables will be stored in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse in German Village, and scraps will be delivered to a composting facility or nearby farms. None of the scraps will go to landfills.
The fewer pickups Eartha makes from a restaurant, the less the eatery will be charged. And Eartha won't have a set pickup schedule like traditional waste-management companies. Stops will be based on need and determined by electronically monitored bins.
Eartha's consulting efforts will help local restaurants transition smoothly into using eco-friendly practices.
"You can't be doing what I do and telling people it's going to be expensive, it's going to be hard, it's going to be hell on your employees," Minnix said. "We preach simplicity, cost neutrality and ease of use. This stuff isn't hard."
Local restaurateur Liz Lessner of Tip Top and Dirty Frank's fame has already partnered with Minnix, and Eartha has plans to work with some large-scale, Columbus-based food-service providers and event venues.
The future of Columbus looks green with Minnix's strong business plan and focus on goodwill.
"We're looking to make this a better place to live," he said. "[Eartha] is going to be a profitable business by caring about the community."