Olympia, WA – March 24, 2004
The owners of the Ark Restaurant in Nahcotta tomorrow will receive the state’s Environmental Excellence Award for reducing and recycling their restaurant waste. Jimella Lucas and Nanci Main will accept the award from the Department of Ecology at a meeting of the Ocean Park Chamber of Commerce. The event begins at noon at the Ocean Park Fire Hall, 26109 Ridge Ave., in Ocean Park.
“Jimella and Nanci are building a sustainable business that preserves and uses resources so those resources will be here in the future,” said Laurie Davies, a manager in the Department of Ecology’s solid-waste program.
“We live in a world where it is easy to throw things away,” Davies said. “The Ark owners do just the opposite — they reduce their trash and then squeeze benefits from the leftovers.”
Lucas and Main began their waste-reducing efforts by recycling glass, plastic and cardboard. They have since expanded into composting, saving their restaurant food waste in bins, where it decomposes and turns into fertilizer. The compost goes onto their organic garden, where crops are grown to serve their guests.
Neighbors take away some of the food waste and use it for their own composting and for animal feed. One neighbor re-uses non-meat food waste to feed his flock of laying hens, yielding eggs and chicken compost for his own garden.
In the end, the restaurant saves money on its trash bill and helps reduce waste that is sent to the landfill. Their compost is an environmentally friendly product that promotes soil health and food production.
Davies said the restaurant’s effort is a step toward a “closed-loop” business in which resources are not discarded, but re-used for new benefits. This is a concept the state is trying to promote with businesses in Washington to drastically reduce and even erase waste.
Davies said a few local pilot programs in the state are testing collection systems for food waste, but none in this area.
“That’s why it’s great to see Nanci and Jimella taking matters into their own hands, leading the way,” she said.
The Department of Ecology issues the Environmental Excellence Award to individuals, businesses and organizations that have shown leadership, innovation or extraordinary service in protecting, improving or cleaning up the environment.
