Amass Chef Explains How to Hit the Money Spot With a Zero-Waste Restaurant

For the uninitiated, here’s the rub: Globally, industrial agriculture processes and landfills full of discarded food account for roughly one quarter of all manmade greenhouse gases. That’s more than the entire transportation sector, which means what’s on your plate impacts the environment more than the car you drive. Chef Douglas McMaster pioneered the zero waste trend in 2014 with the opening of Silo in Brighton, now coupled by his latest fine-dining venture Cub in London. In Brooklyn, Danish chef Mads Refslund, cofounder of Noma, is also picking up the torch with his soon-to-open eatery Fire and Ice. But the zero waste appeal is perhaps most fully and viscerally experienced at Amass in Copenhagen, where chef Matt Orlando and his tight-knit, 20-person staff have been quietly refining renewable techniques since 2013. “Zero waste is talked about a lot, but 90 percent of it is all talk and no show. I didn’t want to be that restaurant,” says Orlando, a tattooed, rebel skateb