The Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows has long been lauded as one of Santa Monica’s top places to stay, with the vast food and beverage options at the resort-style experience a key reason why. Locals and tourists dining at the location can now feel good both during and after their meal, knowing that the hotel has taken on a new innovation in food waste management.
Beginning in late 2023, the Fairmont partnered with Los Angeles-based startup Dyrt on a new food waste processing prototype, keeping nearly three tons of food out of a landfill each week while producing ready-to-use compost (plant fertilizer) for projects like a rooftop garden. Dyrt Founder Lee Robinson said that the benefits of compost range from preventing methane from entering landfills to increasing biodiversity in soil and replenishing topsoil, an important part of taking on statewide agricultural challenges.
The Dyrt unit is a unique offering, consisting of a food shredder, a rotating drum and 14 internet-connected sensors to measure compost temperature and pH levels. The sensors provide real-time data to the hotel, tracking and visualizing the impact of composting by comparing the process to things like “equivalent trees planted” and water conservation.
Dyrt’s technology has come onto the Fairmont’s property just as California State Bill 1383 went into effect on January 1. The bill, also known as California’s Short-Lived Climate Pollutant Reduction law, sets goals to reduce disposal of organic waste in landfills, including edible food, and ensures that food scraps are composted. The regulations aim to divert 75% of organic waste from landfills below 2014 levels by 2025.
Before knowing that the bill would become a requirement, Fairmont management created a sustainability committee with its own goals, including reducing food waste by 30% by 2030.
“It was very, very critical for us to have this vision where we’re producing but also managing that waste … we have a very strong food and beverage offering here, and it was only natural for us to look at the impact we have afterwards,” said Fairmont Miramar Director of Operations Julian Labays.
Labays and the sustainability team sought answers to their goals, with the search taking them to the Rose Bowl where Dyrt had successfully pioneered a pilot program for its prototype. Over a four-month period, the prototype unit processed about 16,000 pounds of food directly at the site, turning it into compost to be used on plants like the famous roses. Robinson said that during the Rose Bowl pilot, businesses began to inquire about the “bigger picture,” including composting and the elimination of trucking hundreds of miles to dispose of waste in landfills.
Credit: Dyrt
“The goal was to figure out a better way to manage our food waste, because it’s a massive greenhouse gas emitter and not building a better planet for future generations … the whole waste infrastructure in the [United States] is so outdated, so bad, and no one looks at it … so we discovered a couple different ways to compost locally,” Robinson said.
The Fairmont gave Dyrt its dumpster area space for the unit, a somewhat surprising development for Robinson, who didn’t expect a top-of-line hotel establishment to become the company’s first business partner.
“They’re strong believers in the environment, [in] doing the right thing,” Robinson said. “They also have some corporate push to track and monitor this data, reduce their upstream spend, which is directly related to food waste … they’re all-in, it’s great.”
Implementing the prototype had a few speed bumps, particularly from what Labays called the “human element” of getting staff up and running with the new system. The first weeks of the project caused headaches with items like forks, gloves, plastic bags, zip ties and Tabasco bottles contaminating the composting process. After some training on the issue, Robinson said that “everyone worked through it,” and the early weeks also alleviated potential concerns about odor emitting from the unit.
“We have cooks that [have been] here for 30-plus years that never had to worry about the organic waste, and so explaining why we’re doing this really took a good turn for them,” Labays added. “They’re really engaged, they’re very proud of what they’re doing.”
Robinson shares in that pride, and the success of the prototype has Dyrt setting its sights on larger projects, such as potentially building communal composting farms capable of managing “thousands of tons” of food waste per day.
“It’s been a whirlwind, that’s for sure … the massive amount of support and people that believe in doing the right thing has been very uplifting,” Robinson added.