Life at the Square

From April 2021, I have worked for a private members club in Bristol, where I got promoted to become the Restaurant manager in September of 2021. The Square Club is a space for creative industries, which is made up from an award winning restaurant and holds many events for the community it has created. This role has allowed me to take on numerous responsibilities, including stock takes and orders, cashing up and training. Alongside managing the restaurant, I have transformed the workspace into a greener working environment, from creating an easy to follow recycling system, with lessons to those in housekeeping (in the attached hotel, whom we share bins with) through to a new water supplier, where the profits go to water aid and removing any single use plastics from the venue. I feel like I transformed the venue into a cleaner working environment, and below explains how I did this:

Bins

When I first started working at the square, it was crazy to me that the general waste bin was larger than the recycling bins and that there was no clear encouragement to recycle as a company. This was easily my first target. I ordered a large food bin and a large recycling bin, and a new general waste bin which was at least half the size. These were clearly labelled and differianted by different colours. Of course, when getting a smaller general waste bin, we also had to decrease the size of the bin liners and it was almost immediately making a difference. 

When emptying these smaller bins into the large industrial bins out to the back of the building was another issue all together. It was not just the restaurant who had to use these bins, but the kitchen team, the bar team, housekeeping and receptionists. The general waste would often get emptied into the recycling bins or the food waste and prevent the bin men from collecting- causing a build up of waste.

I organised and colour coded all of the large bins with reflective tape so it was also easy to tell apart when it was dark and placed the recycling bins together ensuring the the general waste was separate. I then created A4 posters explaining how to effectively empty the rubbish and stuck them in all staff rooms around the building. A lot of the staff do not speak English as their first language and so I ran several workshops for those who asked for further explanation, to go over how the system works and the importance of recycling, including the hotel and housekeeping team. 

I also proceeded in upping the collection of all the recycling bins, to twice a week. After the changes it was obvious that we no longer filled our two industrial general waste bins and so had one of them permanently removed - meaning we had reduced over half of our general waste.

On the bar

The bar was another area where I felt it was easy to change into a greener working environment. Again, the bar team at the time did not recycle. Not even their glass. This immediately changed and two large glass bins were put in places and emptied daily. 

Cling film was another concern of mine as it was regularly used to wrap up many items on the close down.  We found several covers and reusable replacements to ensure we no longer needed to use cling film.

Behind the bar, we set up a hydroponic station to grow our own herbs. This means that we could grow the herbs we needed without soil, so it wasn't disruptive to the bar set up and allowed us to grow our ingredients before the customers eyes. These homegrown herbs would have zero travel miles and no plastic as we could use them whenever we needed.  This also reduced the stock that we needed to buy in.

I created all of the tea-light holders for the bar from recycled glass bottles that were being thrown out. These tea light holders can also be used as planters or storage and can be found on my etsy:

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/98groovyglasses?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=1254710503

Front of house

Removing all single use plastics

• sugar sachets to sugar cubes
  
• coffee cups to biodegradable veg ware products
• condiment sachets, to now be handed out in ramekins

Belu water- profits

I contacted the Belu team who introduced their business into our busy working restaurant. It was to replaced bottled still and sparkling water by a filtered water machine, where half of the profits are donated to Belu, a social enterprise who gives 100% of its profit to WaterAid to transform lives worldwide with clean water.