After all of 12 years, our restaurant Poco in Bristol is closing its doors this spring. We decided very early on to be a zero-waste operation and instigated a closed-loop system that omitted any non-recyclable items from our entire food chain. It was surprisingly easy, too. The first packaging we got rid of was the cellophane wrapping from cucumbers simply by buying them from a different producer. We then set about reducing our compost and recycling further by working closely with suppliers and by cooking from root-to-fruit, using whole seasonal ingredients; I’ve even been known to dig through the compost in search of ingredients that would otherwise go to waste. Our first big win was spent lemon peel, which we turned both into marmalade and this twist on traditional preserved lemons.
