A new green restaurant program will allow downtown Maplewood restaurants to share costs for recycling and composting while advocating environmental awareness.

The city will partner with St. Louis Earth Day, a nonprofit organization that provides environmental education, to create the program. The city will pay St. Louis Earth Day $10,000 for two years of consultation and leadership work, which includes developing plans for individual restaurants and holding workshops to promote best practices. 

Third Ward Councilman Barry Greenberg, one of the program's strongest supporters, said the business community has been receptive to the idea.

"No one has said they don't want to do it in theory," he said. "We're going to have easily 50 percent of these restaurants sign on without any question."

The program, set to start in June 2011, will encourage participating restaurants to reduce their output of landfill waste. For restaurants already recycling and composting waste, the program could result in lower costs, Greenberg said.

"If we had two trash dumpsters picked up every day, instead of 22 dumpsters being picked up once or twice a week," Greenberg said, "Hopefully we're going to lower those costs." 

But the plan requires restaurants pay $500 to participate during the two-year pilot program, with $200 refundable if they successfully implement some of the plan's goals, according to the proposal.

St. Louis Earth Day hopes to help pay for the program with a recycling grant through the St. Louis-Jefferson Solid Waste Management District, something the city council originally didn't want to apply for.

Cassie Phillips, executive director of St. Louis Earth Day, said the organization requested funds to buy biodegradable containers and cover composting costs for a year. The organization will know in February if it was awarded the grant. Even if the proposal is denied, she said the city can move forward with the plan.

"That will be enough to at least do some of the initial exploratory work," Phillips said. 

From there, she expects the program to grow.

"Recycling and composting is the foot in the door, and then you're able to broaden the discussion," she said.

The council approved the program at its meeting on Tuesday. The agreement comes after weeks of heated debate where the council seemed to dismiss the program entirely.

Mayor James White said during a Nov. 9 council work session that the city shouldn't rush into a program without firm committments from businesses. First Ward Councilman David Cerven suggested the city wait for the Sustainability Commission, a city advisory board created at a Oct. 12 meeting, to pursue ideas like the green restaurant program.

But the opposition came against Greenberg's expanded goals, which included a broadened version of the current green restaurant program and the addition of a recycling center in downtown Maplewood. City Manager Marty Corcoran met with Phillips to draft a narrowly defined proposal, which the council members finally approved. 

Greenberg said he thought the other council members were overwhelmed by the number of ideas he presented at the November work session.

"The scope of work that I was describing was everything that we could do, and I was hoping the work session would distill it to what we should do," he said.

While St. Louis Earth Day waits to see if the grant was approved, the organization will begin holding focus groups and orientations to introduce the program to business owners, Phillips said.

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