Recycling and reusing a restaurant's waste : creating a sustainable small-scale urban farm

Urban sprawl, global warming and overused landfills are conditions around the world today, and while people are concerned about these issues they have few practical solutions to them. This creative project seeks to devise a way for a specific sector of business (restaurants), to have a practical way to help reduce global warming and waste while utilizing unused or under-used land in urban areas. While life cycle models are available that address such issues as these, very few case examples are actually in use in this country. Based on existing life cycle models, this project will seek to reuse the wastes from a restaurant and recycle them into a garden/greenhouse (called an urban farm throughout this paper) which will produce food for the restaurant. The three main waste categories from the restaurant to be looked at are the organic kitchen food wastes, water and the heat that is always being expelled from the kitchen while it is operation. Additional ways to make a restaurant more sustainable will also be given. This project will show what the benefits are when a sustainable system is in operation.Department of Landscape ArchitectureThesis (M.L.A.