‘We are anarchists’: The zero-waste restaurants that don’t even have bins

When restaurant Nolla in Helsinki reopened in a new location in July, it had all the hallmarks of the most sustainable of modern restaurants. The stylish drinking glasses were made from bottles with the tops cut off. The kitchen staff wore fetching aprons tailored from recycled bedsheets. An in-house brewery converted food waste into craft ales and served them from 10 taps.

But Nolla does not just dabble in sustainability. It takes it so seriously that the cooking uses no spices. The waiters take their orders with pencils instead of pens. Perhaps most striking of all: the kitchen has no bin. Instead, a silver generator sits proudly in the corner of the restaurant turning any food waste into compost.

That’s because Nolla is a zero-waste restaurant, committed to using ingredients and products that do not create waste. So far, the restaurant’s co-owners Carlos Henriques, Albert Franch Sunyer and Luka Balak, have not found a way to procure pepper and spices without creating waste, so they do without. They permit no single-use plastic, including plastic packaging, cling film, vacuum bags or silver foil. Even the gift cards are made of compostable paper – with poppy seeds in, so guests can grow their own flowers.

The hospitality industry is a major cause of food waste, costing the global economy $940bn (£770bn) a year in economic losses, according to the UN. A report from the World Resources Institute found that over a third of the world’s food is wasted between the farm and the table. If it were a country, food loss and waste would be the third-largest emitter after China and the US, the report said.

In the UK alone, 900,000 unsold meals are thrown out by restaurants every year, according to the food waste app Too Good To Go. Yet Carlos Henriques says he can count the number of zero-waste restaurants in the world on one hand.

“There are four in the world that I can name for you right now,” he says. Alongside Blue Hill in New York and Amass in Copenhagen, Nolla shares best practice with Silo, the Brighton-based UK zero-waste restaurant that is relocating to east London in October.

Silo is opening a new restaurant in the White Building in Hackney Wick where it will serve a continually changing menu of 10 to 15 dishes. Chef Douglas McMaster says that Silo’s philosophy of zero waste is a way of “closing the loop” in the food production process. “Everything gets used,” he says. “There are multiple necessary actions including composting and trading directly with farmers.”

The UK restaurant, which opened in 2014, has received national attention for its waste-free ethos, with plates made from plastic bags, tables from industrial floor tiles and workbenches from filing cabinet frames. All the products that are delivered to Silo come in re-usable crates, pails, urns and other containers. Everything that isn’t consumed by customers is fed into an anaerobic digester which can generate up to 60kg of compost in 24 hours.

Nolla adopted many of these practices, including the idea of having milk delivered in aluminium pails instead of plastic cartons. “We are kind of anarchists,” Henriques says. The Nolla team were especially excited by the idea of the anaerobic composter. They went to Brighton to see Silo’s machine in action and decided to give their own composter pride of place in the restaurant. On any given evening, diners can be seen peering into Nolla’s machine, whose compost goes to the farmers supplying the restaurant with fresh produce.

The three founders were first inspired to start a zero-waste restaurant after years of working in different restaurants in Helsinki and overseas. “When you do fine dining, you work a lot,” Henriques says. “For me, working all these hours, I wanted to have a higher mission than just good food. I’m trying to leave the world a better place than when I started.”

Their experience in the restaurant industry also highlighted the huge amount of waste generated during preparation. They got to see every carrot top, cheese rind and jug of sauce left after the customers were served. Moreover, the founders noticed the amount of plastic waste and packaging that was generated in the process. They came up with the idea for a zero-waste restaurant to make the industry more sustainable, without compromising on quality. They began hosting pop-up events with only €15,000 in 2015. In 2017, they crowdfunded almost €100,000 to establish their restaurant in its permanent location.

Although Nolla did not originally set out to use only local ingredients, the founders realised that the international products came in too much wasteful packaging and created a carbon footprint from the travelling. So they invented set menus of either four or six dishes that allowed them to use every part of their produce. “You come and you eat whatever we can get that day,” he says. “We will fix [the dish] if someone doesn’t want something. In a way, we are more flexible because we give less choice.”

The restaurant’s ethos constantly evolves around regulations and technology. The cleaning detergents, for example, still come in plastic containers in order to comply with Finnish food regulations. Henriques says Nolla is developing software to measure and record everything that goes into the composter, to reduce the amount that has to be recycled into compost. “Eventually we will develop software to teach other restaurants how to use a composter too,” Henriques says.

He believes that every restaurant should eradicate needless plastic such as clingfilm and vacuum bags, but that it will take demand for change from consumers before many will try. “Everyone congratulates us but when we ask why they don’t do it, there is silence,” he says. “It’s important for other people to understand that what we do is possible – and that it needs to happen.”