King County food waste composting program helps Crown Hill restaurant continue recycling bent

2004 Archived News

Recycling is hardly a new concept at Connie Stone’s Wild Mountain Café in Seattle’s Crown Hill neighborhood.

Stone has combined a menu of fresh, down-home meals with “recycled” everything else. The furniture, dishes and silverware at Wild Mountain were all purchased from local thrift stores or at auctions. Additionally, the slate bar top came from a former school chalkboard; while the tops of tile tables were made from tile scraps that washed up on the beach.

Through the King County Food Waste Composting for Business and Schools Program, the North Seattle restaurant has also maintained a BioStack outdoor worm bin since July 2003, composting 837 pounds of food scraps in its first year in operation.

“We’ve always recycled everything that we possibly could,” says Stone, who says she found out about the King County program through a flyer she received in the mail. She had to wait to participate, however, until the program expanded to include businesses within Seattle city limits.

Participating in the program has presented a few challenges, she says. “It’s slow going getting a worm bin started,” she says, and the worms are far less active in colder weather.

Working with her local waste hauler, Stone has also added additional recycling bins to allow the recycling of items including bones and eggshells, plus whatever food wastes won’t fit into the worm bin.

Wild Mountain Café is one of 14 schools and businesses helping the King County Solid Waste Division assess the feasibility of small-scale, on-site, food waste composting through this pilot program. Partially funded by a 2003 grant from the Washington State Department of Ecology, the program is testing several different composting systems, including the Earth Tub (manufactured by Green Mountain Technologies) and the BioStack (manufactured by BioSystem Solutions).

Currently, food wastes account for 14.6 percent of King County’s total waste stream. King County is also running a pilot program to collect residential food waste and plans to add a second pilot program in 2005 to collect commercial food waste.

For more information about this program, contact Kinley Deller at 206-296-4434.