On the menu at The Garden by Poco Piatti are Mediterranean bowls and wraps, pizza – and sustainability.

The Garden has a scratch kitchen that has been serving delicious food for park visitors since June of 2023. Now, with a grant from the The Kroger Co., Market Hall at Glass City Metropark, where the restaurant is located, is on its way to becoming a zero waste facility.

Kroger’s support, part of the Ohio company’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste action plan, will fund public composting bins to collect food waste and more.

“We donate our food, we compost food that can’t be donated to hunger-ending partners, but when we can find partnerships like this that can take that out into the community, that’s what we’re looking for,” said Mark Bruce, corporate affairs manager for Kroger.

"We are thrilled to partner with Metroparks and Kroger to launch the composting initiative,” said Elias Hajjar, the restaurant’s owner. “Since opening The Garden, we have proudly served nearly 200,000 meals to our guests, including catered for events at Market Hall, Cabana Village and the Glass City Pavilion. Thanks to this initiative, everything that goes over the counter to the customer is compostable—from food to cups, plates, utensils and more—and can now be easily discarded in the new green compost bins.”

“Additionally,” Elias noted, “the commercial composting program collects all back-of-house food waste weekly. We’re honored to take the lead in this initiative, making Market Hall a zero-waste facility.”

The composting service is provided by GoZero, which supplies commercial bins, dumpsters and weekly collection.

The restaurant has already taken big steps to reducing waste by serving food in bowls and drinks in plastic cups with straws that are all compostable, said Lisa Whitton, a Metroparks regional supervisor who leads the park system’s Green Team initiative. “GoZero, our partner, is an industrial compost site, so they can take those things and compost them, even if you can’t do that in your own backyard composting,” she said.

The Green Team, working with Keep Toledo – Lucas County Beautiful, the City of Toledo and GoZero, already has collection bins at three locations where the public can dispose of food waste. The collection bins are located at Swan Creek Preserve (Airport Highway entrance), Toledo Botanical Garden (Bancroft Street entrance) and Glass City (on Front Street at Morrison Drive).

The Market Hall initiative is a one-year pilot program with GoZero that is a natural extension of the composting program, Lisa said.

It is estimated that 63 million tons of food is wasted each year in the US, or about 40 percent of the food in America, making it the single largest type of waste in everyday trash.

“By making composting simple and easy, we can keep much of that waste out of landfills, where it breaks down and produces methane gas. If you compost it, it does not create that methane and can also be reused,” Lisa said.

Over the last year, she added, more than 55,000 pounds of food waste was collected and composted at Metroparks locations.

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Lisa Whitton and Mark Bruce spoke with 13abc about the composting program.

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