Vote for your favorite Replenish restaurant on Tuesday nights during May and June 2012 and win prizes for doing your part to help reduce greenhouse gases, improve the Chesapeake Bay watershed and support local agriculture! *Drawing will be held in early July 2012. Winners will be notified by EDEN Delmarva. No purchase necessary to participate. One entry per guest will be provided for Tuesday guests from May 1 to June 26, at participating REPLENISH restaurants. Entries are pooled from all participating REPLENISH restaurants and selected by EDEN Delmarva. Prizes not redeemable for cash value.

REPLENISH PROGRAM INFORMATION

As a demonstration project of EDEN Delmarva, REPLENISH promotes the recovery of organic materials from Rehoboth Beach restaurants for the creation of compost and soil additives that help serve local farmers with their crops.

REPLENISH is a collaboration among restaurants, haulers, a compost facility, and local farmers. Local favorites like Matt Haley at Blue Coast Restaurant, Arena’s Café, GoFish, and El Dorado have all begun to participate in diverting their organic material (table scraps).  Blue Hen Disposal will be hauling the material to the compost facility at Blue Hen Organics in Dagsboro, DE.  The training for the separation of organic wastes at other Rehoboth hot spots is getting underway.

The purpose is to reclaim the valuable nutrients in table scraps, to cultivate compost for local farmers, which stimulates the farmer to grow and sell produce locally, which in turn can feed the folks at the same restaurants that recover the organic material. EDEN’s seeks to encourage business leaders within the restaurant, resource recovery, transportation, and agricultural sectors to cultivate a paradigm shift in their business models that will be economically rewarding and good for the earth.

EDEN’s REPLENISH Program is a self-certifying program where businesses are qualified to participate by diverting valuable organic material away from the landfills, and creating compost, and/or soil additives which enable local farmers with their agricultural products. The mission of REPLENISH is to create a sustainable new practice in the marketplace with economic benefits for everyone, including the resource recovery specialist/hauler, restaurant, composter, and local farmer. The demonstration project seeks to create awareness of the new practices through community education and the multi-media publication of information about the on-going program, and its outcome data. The goal is to help catalyze a change in resource management and recovery practices.

Participating haulers, restaurants, and farmers in the program will be included in the programs’ educational community outreach efforts, and profiled on the REPLENISH website, DNREC’s – restaurant certification site, and elsewhere.