New Krishna Bhavan In Bengaluru Is A Zero Waste Restaurant

Gopinath Prabhu, the owner of New Krishna Bhavan on Sampige Road, came up with a unique solution for the problem three years ago, making him earn the zero-waste tag for his restaurant. While wet waste generated by the eatery is given to a piggery having 300 to 400 pigs, rag pickers collect the dry waste, and the sediments of leftover coffee and tea is dumped in a compost pit in the park across the road.

“We generate about 300kg to 400kg of wet waste every day. Segregation happens constantly through the day. The leftover food dumped in a bucket is collected by the piggery every morning. Barrels have been installed in the kitchen into which the workers dump leftover food. There are separate buckets for tea and coffee waste.Solid waste such as plastic bottles and cardboard items are given away to rag pickers,” Prabhu says.

Prabu uses a 3 R mantra-reduce, reuse and recycle – keeping a logbook of the quantities of rice and vegetables going to waste every day helped calculate optimum procurement of raw materials for the eatery.

“We used to order a fixed quantity of goods every day regardless of how much was used. We reduced that after we realized how much was going to waste. Leftovers from our kitchen, that doesn’t qualify as waste, are given to the poor and the needy,” he says.

The restaurant, which sees a footfall of about 1,000 people every day, avails no service from the municipal corporation to get rid of the huge amount of waste it generates. Prabhu says that arbitrary revisions in the rate, delay in collecting garbage and unreliability of their services motivated him to take charge of his own waste.