The UK's first restaurant where nothing is wasted and everything is made and recycled on site
We all love food and we all hate wasting it, so why is there currently 5 billion pounds worth of food waste a year in the UK? That’s 7 million tonnes of food and drink, 50% of which could have been eaten.

These statistics have frustrated Douglas McMaster (former BBC young chef of the year) enough for him to lead by example with a new sustainable approach. With twelve years experience in fine dining all around the world, McMaster has now opened his own restaurant, Silo, in Brighton.

Silo is the UK’s first zero-waste restaurant, which means they throw away nothing and nothing is wasted. Visitors to the restaurant can choose from six dishes a day, with a meat option, vegan option, fish option and a wild card option. The restaurant, which seats 50, aims to minimise 95% of the usual waste that comes from restaurants. This ambitious concept starts at the bottom; Silo mill their own flour, make yoghurt, roll oats, bake bread, brew beer and vinegar, cure meat and compost all food on site, they even reuse the wasted water from coffee’s to flush the toilets with. The restaurant itself was also built and designed by working with local designers, using sustainable design processes.

Douglas McMaster is challenging the way we think by demonstrating the available processes for recycling food waste. Collecting post-consumer waste in restaurants and recycling all of it will make a vast difference to the alarming statistics we are currently responsible for, in-turn bringing us closer to closing the ‘waste/recycle/reuse’ loop.  Another interesting example of local recycling is product designer Ariane Prin, who creates new products using the waste that is created by students at RCA.