Ever wondered what zero waste means? We talked to someone who knows how to achieve it! “Hi, i’m now from Berlin. We’re in a restaurant FREA (Vegan Zero Waste Restaurant in Berlin), which has just opened.
We’re the first 100 percent vegan, zero-waste restaurant. And when we talk about zero waste and sustainability, we’re primarily talking about food.
How can we produce tasty, healthy and sustainable food? It’s simple: we make everything ourselves. We shun industrial production and just make everything ourselves: whether it’s drinks, our own bread, our own pasta, our hazelnut butter or hazelnut milk.
Then there’s our daily drinks: like water kefir ((aka tibicos)) that’s really probiotic, and our homemade kombucha.” “Everything’s delivered straight from the farm, from the field to us in the restaurant: whether it’s mushrooms, leeks or parsley.
Everything comes to us unpackaged and plastic-free.” “We don’t aim to ‘veganize’ anyone or turn them into ‘zero wasters’; we just want to serve up good food in an undogmatic way. But we aim to remain pragmatic; we want todo something.
Not talk about it, just do it.” “Sure, many things are packed in plastic. We can’t avoid that. But during renovation, we collected all the plastic that came in to the restaurant and sent it to a company that melted it down. And now, we’ve hung it on the wall.
So this used to be about 15 kilos of plastic packaging.“ “When I talk about the renovation, I mean the interior. How can we design the interior so it’s as sustainable as possible?
Eighty percent of our furnishings came from E-Bay classified ads. Our tabletops were cut out of old oaken beams.
Our eight lampshades above the bar are bya designer I got to know about a year and a half ago. These lamps are made of mycelium from a fungus that grows in the shape of a lamp. You feed them with sawdust, and within seven days, it will take on this shape. Then you dry it out, and it’s finished.
The lampshade doesn’t weigh any more than one kilo. And if I should ever decide that I’m bored with it – and I never will be – I could just toss it in the composting machine, and it’ll be gone. So these are 100-percent compos table lampshades.
“When we talk about zero-waste und sustainability, we mean we take our food scraps – whatever we can’t ferment or can, and we can’t cook it or re-use it in any way.
And throw it into a composting machine that turns all leftover foods into a soil surrogate within 24 hours. We give that soil to the farmers, and they spread it on their fields. So that’s a wonderful, hundred-percent closed-loop recycling. And from that, delicious vegetables grow for us.“
