BAR AND RESTAURANT RECYCLING CASE STUDY:

CAFE PORTOFINO

Café Portofino offers casual dining with a family oriented “Hawaiian” type atmosphere. It serves authentic Hawaiian, Thai, Italian, Eurasian and seafood cuisine.

The owners of Café Portofino, Sandee Ashbee and Burt Myers, moved to Boone from Hawaii and have traveled worldwide. Sandi says that Café Portofino “serves five-star food at two-star prices.”

Sandee’s background has shaped her view of recycling. Although she believes recycling to be a bit more expensive than disposal, she has opted to recycle because it is the environmentally friendly thing to do. The restaurant serves beer and wine in glass bottles and recycles those containers in addition to aluminum cans.

Café Portofino has collection bins in the taproom and crates in the restaurant. Employees take the bins and crates out to the back of the restaurant, where aluminum cans and glass bottles, separated by color, are placed into the eight, 96-gallon rollout bins provided by a commercial hauler.

The waste hauler/recycler serving Café Portofino collects the rollouts on a weekly basis, using an automatic cart dumper on a truck with separated bins.

Sandee says the $162 the restaurant pays monthly for collection services is well worth the price to be protecting the environment.