A neighborhood seafood restaurant in Tacoma, Washington — Anthony’s at Point Defiance, part of a regional small chain that has operated in the Pacific Northwest since the 1980s — became the subject of a small but interesting case study in 2023. A regional waste-diversion program run by the Pierce County Solid Waste Division gave them a recognition award for what they called “Total Citrus Recovery.” The reason: their bar program had been redesigned to ensure every lemon wedge, lime wedge, and orange peel — used or unused — went to compost rather than trash.
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The number that got people’s attention: about 92,000 citrus wedges per year diverted from landfill at that one location alone. Small wedges, sure. But aggregated across a busy bar program running 7 days a week, it added up to roughly 1,300 pounds of citrus annually.
What’s interesting isn’t the number. It’s how unremarkable the workflow change was once they figured it out. Let’s walk through what they did and what it actually changed.
Why citrus disappears into trash by default
Walk behind any restaurant bar in the US and watch what happens to used garnishes. A customer leaves a half-finished cocktail with a lemon wedge floating in it. The bartender dumps the glass into a small under-counter sink with a grate strainer. The wedge falls into the strainer; the strainer empties into a trash can.
The problem isn’t that bartenders don’t care about composting. It’s that the workflow puts trash exactly where the garnish naturally lands. The strainer-to-trash path is built into the geometry of the bar. To compost a wedge, you’d have to pick it out of the strainer with tongs or hands, walk it to a separate compost bin, and come back. That’s extra time per drink, and bar speed matters.
The same dynamic happens with garnish prep. A prep cook slicing 200 lemon wedges for a Saturday night produces a small mountain of citrus end caps and peel scraps. The cutting board scrap pile gets swept into trash because the trash can is right there. The compost bin is 12 feet away in the back.
Composting at restaurants tends to capture the obvious stuff — coffee grounds, kitchen veg scraps, banquet leftovers — and miss the small repetitive items that disappear into trash by workflow default. Citrus wedges are the textbook example.
The redesign
A new bar manager hired in late 2022 noticed the citrus loss and proposed three changes. Two of them got pushback from the owners (cost concerns). One was approved as a pilot. Here’s what got tested:
Change 1 — Replace the strainer trash with a strainer compost. The under-counter grate sink that catches dumped drink contents was modified so the strainer empties into a small lidded compost bin instead of a trash can. The bin sits in the same spot the trash bin used to sit. No new motion required from the bartender. Cost: about $30 for the bin and minor plumbing labor.
Change 2 — Add a bar-rail compost bin within arm’s reach. A second small compost bin (about 1 gallon) was added directly under the garnish station where bartenders place garnishes onto drinks. When a bartender finishes a drink and discards an unused garnish, it now goes 18 inches into a labeled compost bin instead of into a trash can six feet away. Cost: about $40 including the labeling.
Change 3 — Move prep-cook compost bin onto the prep counter, not below it. Previously, the compost bin in the prep area was on the floor next to the trash can. Citrus end-cap scrap was being swept off cutting boards into the trash by reflex. The redesign placed a small compost bin on the prep counter directly behind the cutting board, with the trash can moved 6 feet further away. Now the closest receptacle for cutting board scrap is the compost. Cost: zero — just rearranging existing bins.
Total upfront cost: under $100. Total ongoing cost: zero, since the compost service was already being paid for; the citrus was just being routed differently within the same waste stream.
What changed in measurements
The owners agreed to a 90-day measurement period. The bar manager tracked compost-bin contents (rough volume measurement) and trash-bin contents (the same), focused on identifying citrus presence.
Pre-pilot baseline:
– Trash bin behind bar (per day): roughly 40% by volume was citrus, glass strainer detritus, and miscellaneous bar waste
– Compost bin behind bar (per day): about 5-10% by volume was citrus
Post-pilot (after 30 days, once routines stabilized):
– Trash bin behind bar (per day): less than 5% by volume was citrus
– Compost bin behind bar (per day): now contained essentially all citrus output
The shift was dramatic and immediate. The reason was that the workflow now naturally directed citrus to compost; no behavior change was required from staff. Bartenders weren’t being asked to compost more; they were just continuing to dump drinks into the strainer, and the strainer now flowed to a different bin.
Annualized, the measurement suggested about 1,300 pounds of citrus and roughly 220 pounds of related bar organics (mint, olives, cherries, banana garnish, sugar rim scraps) were now going to compost rather than landfill. The estimated 92,000 wedges per year figure came from multiplying daily wedge counts (about 250 per day on average) by 365 days.
How the award happened
The regional waste-diversion program — operated by the Pierce County Solid Waste Division — ran an annual “Diversion Champion” recognition starting in 2021. The award targets businesses that demonstrate measurable diversion improvements with simple replicable workflows. Past winners included a coffee shop that switched to compostable cup lids, a brewery that diverted spent grain to a regional farm, and a bakery that composted dough trimmings.
The Anthony’s bar program was nominated by the compost hauler — Republic Services in this region — after the hauler’s drivers noticed the bar’s compost-bin contents had visibly changed. The hauler submitted the nomination, the Pierce County program audited the workflow, and the award was given in fall 2023.
The recognition itself was modest — a plaque, a small mention in a regional sustainability newsletter, and inclusion in a county-level case study document. But for a neighborhood restaurant, the brand bump was real. The award got mentioned in a Tacoma News Tribune piece and was used in the restaurant’s marketing materials for the following year.
What this case study suggests broadly
The interesting takeaway isn’t “lemon wedges should go to compost” — most people would agree with that. The takeaway is that workflow design beats behavior training nine times out of ten when it comes to recycling and composting in restaurants.
The “compost more” message — posted as a sign over a trash bin in a busy bar — gets ignored. Bartenders are moving fast, customers are waiting, and the visible-but-distant compost bin loses to the under-counter trash bin every time. Asking staff to consistently change their behavior under pressure doesn’t work.
Changing the physical geometry — putting the compost bin where the trash bin used to be, putting the trash bin further away — works without anyone having to think about it. The behavior conforms to the new geometry within 1-2 weeks.
Three lessons that translate to other restaurants:
Find the high-volume small items that disappear into the workflow. Citrus wedges, paper napkins, used coffee filters, tea bags. These are the items that get missed because the workflow path leads to trash by default.
Don’t ask staff to walk further to compost. If compost is far away and trash is close, trash wins. Make compost the closer option for the items you want diverted.
Measure rather than estimate. The 90-day measurement period was what convinced the owners to keep the program. Without measurement, the change might have been reversed when the bar manager moved on.
For other operations thinking about this
Restaurants serving cocktails or non-alcoholic drinks with garnishes can replicate this almost exactly. The key bottleneck is having compost pickup service that accepts citrus and other bar organics — most commercial compost programs do, but some are restricted to yard waste only. Verify before redesigning your bar.
Coffee shops have an even higher-leverage version: filter-and-grounds compost, which can be 30-40% of total daily waste volume. Some shops route used filters directly into compostable bags that go to compost; others fold paper filters into the grounds and dispose as a single compost unit.
Theme parks and stadiums face a different problem — the waste happens in customer-facing bins, not staff-controlled bins. Customer-facing diversion is harder; it requires either color-coded bin systems with clear visual signaling, or hand-sorting on the back end.
For restaurants exploring compostable food containers and compostable utensils, the citrus-wedge case study is instructive: the success wasn’t really about what was being thrown away but about where the bins were located and how the workflow naturally directed materials.
What happened next
Anthony’s expanded the bar workflow redesign to its other Pacific Northwest locations starting in 2024. Not all locations had compost service available, but where service existed, the bar bin redesign was added to the operational playbook.
The bar manager who designed the change has since left for a different restaurant group, where she’s pitching similar workflow redesigns. The basic insight — geometry over training — applies broadly across restaurant operations.
For diners visiting the Tacoma location, the change is invisible. You order a drink, you get a drink with a wedge in it, you drink it, you leave. Behind the bar, that wedge now follows a 20-inch path to a compost bin instead of being lifted out of a strainer and walked over to one. It’s the kind of change that doesn’t get noticed but adds up — at roughly 250 wedges per day, it’s the difference between sending 92,000 lemon wedges to a landfill and sending them to a compost facility where they break down in 8-12 weeks.
A small workflow redesign, a regional award, and an example that other restaurants in the area have started copying. Not a transformative innovation, but exactly the kind of practical diversion improvement that scales when restaurants share what works.
For B2B sourcing, see our compostable cocktail straws or compostable skewers & picks catalog.
Background on the underlying standards: ASTM D6400 defines the U.S. industrial-compost performance bar, EN 13432 harmonises the EU equivalent, and the FTC Green Guides govern how “compostable” can be marketed on packaging in the United States.