Brew Works' leftovers nourish Berks County soil

Brew Works is composting 100% of our food scraps and food soiled paper products. We look forward to having other Lehigh Valley restaurants join in the effort to reduce waste sent to landfills.

Thank you to all of our staff, Tom Kerr (City of Allentown) and Erin Frederick (Lehigh County Conservation)!

The giant black garbage bin behind the Allentown Brew Works used to hold all sorts of trash from diners’ unfinished plates: wet coasters, soggy french fries, old lemons, sandwich crusts.

Now that mess of leftovers — about 900 tons a year between the Allentown and Bethlehem Brew Works restaurants — isn’t destined for a sodden burial in a landfill but a long happy life on a farm in Berks County.

Brew Works is the first Allentown restaurant in a Lehigh County-run pilot project aimed to get Allentown eateries, then all Lehigh Valley restaurants, to send their food scraps to small farms to be composted into soil nutrients.

July 20, 2011 | By Devon Lash, Of The Morning Call

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