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Restaurants and the food industry in general

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are pretty much the most wasteful industry

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in the world.

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For every calorie of food that we consume here in Britain today,

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10 calories are taken to produce it.

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That's a lot.

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I want to take something rather humble

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to discuss.

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I found this in the farmers' market today,

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and if anybody wants to take it home and mash it later, you're very welcome to.

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The humble potato --

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and I've spent a long time, 25 years, preparing these.

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And it pretty much goes through

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eight different forms in its lifetime.

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First of all, it's planted, and that takes energy.

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It grows and is nurtured.

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It's then harvested.

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It's then distributed,

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and distribution is a massive issue.

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It's then sold and bought,

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and it's then delivered to me.

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I basically take it, prepare it,

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and then people consume it -- hopefully they enjoy it.

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The last stage is basically waste,

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and this is is pretty much where everybody disregards it.

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There are different types of waste.

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There's a waste of time; there's a waste of space; there's a waste of energy;

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and there's a waste of waste.

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And every business I've been working on

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over the past five years,

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I'm trying to lower each one of these elements.

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Okay, so you ask what a sustainable restaurant looks like.

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Basically a restaurant just like any other.

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This is the restaurant, Acorn House.

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Front and back.

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So let me run you through a few ideas.

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Floor: sustainable, recyclable.

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Chairs: recycled and recyclable.

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Tables: Forestry Commission.

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This is Norwegian Forestry Commission wood.

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This bench, although it was uncomfortable for my mom --

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she didn't like sitting on it,

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so she went and bought these cushions for me from a local jumble sale --

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reusing, a job that was pretty good.

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I hate waste, especially walls.

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If they're not working, put a shelf on it, which I did,

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and that shows all the customers my products.

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The whole business is run on sustainable energy.

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This is powered by wind. All of the lights are daylight bulbs.

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Paint is all low-volume chemical,

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which is very important when you're working in the room all the time.

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I was experimenting with these -- I don't know if you can see it --

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but there's a work surface there.

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And that's a plastic polymer.

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And I was thinking, well I'm trying to think nature, nature, nature.

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But I thought, no, no, experiment with resins,

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experiment with polymers.

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Will they outlive me? They probably might.

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Right, here's a reconditioned coffee machine.

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It actually looks better than a brand new one -- so looking good there.

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Now reusing is vital.

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And we filter our own water.

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We put them in bottles, refrigerate them,

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and then we reuse that bottle again and again and again.

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Here's a great little example.

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If you can see this orange tree, it's actually growing in a car tire,

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which has been turned inside out and sewn up.

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It's got my compost in it, which is growing an orange tree, which is great.

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This is the kitchen, which is in the same room.

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I basically created a menu that allowed people

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to choose the amount and volume of food

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that they wanted to consume.

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Rather than me putting a dish down,

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they were allowed to help themselves to as much or as little as they wanted.

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Okay, it's a small kitchen. It's about five square meters.

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It serves 220 people a day.

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We generate quite a lot of waste.

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This is the waste room.

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You can't get rid of waste.

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But this story's not about eliminating it, it's about minimizing it.

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In here, I have produce and boxes

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that are unavoidable.

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I put my food waste into this dehydrating, desiccating macerator --

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turns food into an inner material,

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which I can store and then compost later.

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I compost it in this garden.

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All of the soil you can see there is basically my food,

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which is generated by the restaurant,

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and it's growing in these tubs, which I made out of storm-felled trees

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and wine casks and all kinds of things.

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Three compost bins --

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go through about 70 kilos of raw vegetable waste a week --

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really good, makes fantastic compost.

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A couple of wormeries in there too.

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And actually one of the wormeries

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was a big wormery. I had a lot of worms in it.

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And I tried taking the dried food waste,

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putting it to the worms, going, "There you go, dinner."

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It was like vegetable jerky,

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and killed all of them.

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I don't know how many worms [were] in there,

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but I've got some heavy karma coming, I tell you.

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(Laughter)

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What you're seeing here is a water filtration system.

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This takes the water out of the restaurant,

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runs it through these stone beds -- this is going to be mint in there --

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and I sort of water the garden with it.

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And I ultimately want to recycle that, put it back into the loos,

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maybe wash hands with it, I don't know.

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So, water is a very important aspect.

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I started meditating on that

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and created a restaurant called Waterhouse.

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If I could get Waterhouse to be a no-carbon restaurant

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that is consuming no gas to start with, that would be great.

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I managed to do it.

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This restaurant looks a little bit like Acorn House --

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same chairs, same tables.

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They're all English and a little bit more sustainable.

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But this is an electrical restaurant.

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The whole thing is electric, the restaurant and the kitchen.

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And it's run on hydroelectricity,

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so I've gone from air to water.

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Now it's important to understand

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that this room

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is cooled by water, heated by water,

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filters its own water,

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and it's powered by water.

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It literally is Waterhouse.

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The air handling system inside it --

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I got rid of air-conditioning

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because I thought there was too much consumption going on there.

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This is basically air-handling.

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I'm taking the temperature of the canal outside,

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pumping it through the heat exchange mechanism,

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it's turning through these amazing sails on the roof,

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and that, in turn, is falling softly onto the people in the restaurant,

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cooling them, or heating them, as the need may be.

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And this is an English willow air diffuser,

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and that's softly moving

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that air current through the room.

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Very advanced, no air-conditioning -- I love it.

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In the canal, which is just outside the restaurant,

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there is hundreds of meters of coil piping.

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This takes the temperature of the canal

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and turns it into this four-degrees of heat exchange.

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I have no idea how it works, but I paid a lot of money for it.

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(Laughter)

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And what's great is one of the chefs who works in that restaurant

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lives on this boat -- it's off-grid; it generates all its own power.

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He's growing all his own fruit, and that's fantastic.

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There's no accident in names of these restaurants.

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Acorn House is the element of wood; Waterhouse is the element of water;

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and I'm thinking, well, I'm going to be making

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five restaurants based

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on the five Chinese medicine acupuncture specialities.

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I've got water and wood. I'm just about to do fire.

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I've got metal and earth to come.

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So you've got to watch your space for that.

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Okay. So this is my next project.

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Five weeks old,

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it's my baby, and it's hurting real bad.

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The People's Supermarket.

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So basically, the restaurants only really hit

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people who believed in what I was doing anyway.

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What I needed to do was get food out

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to a broader spectrum of people.

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So people -- i.e., perhaps, more working-class --

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or perhaps people who actually believe in a cooperative.

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This is a social enterprise,

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not-for-profit cooperative supermarket.

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It really is about the social disconnect

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between food, communities

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in urban settings

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and their relationship to rural growers --

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connecting communities in London to rural growers.

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Really important.

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So I'm committing to potatoes; I'm committing to milk;

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I'm committing to leeks and broccoli -- all very important stuff.

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I've kept the tiles; I've kept the floors;

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I've kept the trunking; I've got in some recycled fridges;

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I've got some recycled tills; I've got some recycled trolleys.

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I mean, the whole thing is is super-sustainable.

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In fact, I'm trying and I'm going to make this

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the most sustainable supermarket in the world.

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That's zero food waste.

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And no one's doing that just yet.

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In fact, Sainsbury's, if you're watching,

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let's have a go. Try it on.

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I'm going to get there before you.

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So nature doesn't create waste

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doesn't create waste as such.

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Everything in nature is used up in a closed continuous cycle

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with waste being the end of the beginning,

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and that's been something that's been nurturing me for some time,

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and it's an important statement to understand.

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If we don't stand up

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and make a difference

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and think about sustainable food,

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think about the sustainable nature of it,

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then we may fail.

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But, I wanted to get up and show you

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that we can do it if we're more responsible.

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Environmentally conscious businesses are doable.

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They're here. You can see I've done three so far;

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I've got a few more to go.

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The idea is embryonic.

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I think it's important.

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I think that if we reduce, reuse, refuse

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and recycle -- right at the end there --

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recycling is the last point I want to make;

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but it's the four R's, rather than the three R's --

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then I think we're going to be on our way.

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So these three are not perfect -- they're ideas.

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I think that there are many problems to come,

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but with help, I'm sure I'm going to find solutions.

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And I hope you all take part.

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Thank you very much. (Applause)