By Jim Cavan

It’s minutes past six on a frigid February morning, and Rian Bedard is picking through a yellow wastebasket full of garbage. He’s only had but a sip or two of coffee, and the truck he used to get here -- the white Chevy parked in the still-quiet alley behind the Portsmouth Brewery -- has been shut off, immediately liquidating the tenuous warmth inside.

The mercury flirting with zero, Bedard’s gloved hands are happy enough to find a warm, albeit brief relief as they rifle through a day or two’s worth of lukewarm restaurant scraps; everything from fruit rinds to pulled pork to near-rotten sauces and chicken scraps. The real culprits are harder to find: the coffee stirrers, rubber bands, crayons, plastic bags and bottle caps serving as the slippery needles in the slimiest of haystacks . Setting aside these undesirables -- they’ll come in handy later -- Bedard and his partner, Marcel Miranda, repeat the process up to twelve times, depending on how many Portsmouth restaurants have left the requisite yellow baskets outside their back doors.

What remains -- anywhere from 100 pounds to multiple tons of would-be waste -- is hauled off to Bartlett Farms in Eliot, Maine, where it is added to the mountainous mounds of compost waiting to be added to the 7 acres of chilled soil. In a few months, after “cooking” out any dangerous pathogens, these once land-fill bound buckets of refuse will ultimately end up in the hands local farmers and green thumbs in the form of plant-ready soil.

When imparting the science behind the scraps, Bedard’s explanations are like his demeanor: easy and laid back. “When it comes down to it, methane is a lot stronger than what’s coming out of that tailpipe over there,” says Bedard, pointing to his truck. “This way that methane is mixing with other gases like oxygen and nitrogen freely and going back into the soil, instead of going into the atmosphere, like at a regular dump.”

Miranda, meanwhile, is the more outspokenly idealistic of the two, viewing the tiresome task in a more philosophical light. “The world changed three years ago with the financial crisis -- everything changed,” says Miranda. “And that ultimately raised the question: what’s a better way to take care of the world? Clearly the system in place wasn’t and isn’t working, and we had to start asking ourselves, ‘wheres our food being grown?’ ‘Where are our jobs?’ ‘Where’s the money coming from?’ When looked at holistically, you realize it starts at home, right where you are, with the everyday things.”

Everyday things like the famous “Three Rs”; reducing, reusing, and recycling -- things that Miranda knows more than a little bit about: he spent years working in the construction and landscaping sectors, where he helped businesses both recycle and reuse everything from grass clippings to building materials.

For Miranda, nothing was to small to save. “The way I see it, everything has value, “Miranda exclaims. “What people need to realize is that you could actually make money by saving materials, especially if you don’t have to pay someone to get rid of it.”

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While outwardly less desirable than most mandatory community service work, Bedard and Miranda have instead turned this gritty routine into a full-fledges business. The company, EcoMovement Consulting and Hauling, was launched last September as a way of raising awareness about waste in a sector -- the restaurant industry -- long mired in it. So far the duo has done just that: in less than half a year, EcoMovement has already succeeded in bringing on some of the most familiar names in Seacoast eats, including the Portsmouth Brewery, Pocos Bow Street Cantina, Two Ceres Street, Green Monkey, Ceres Street Bakery, Brazo, Robert’s Maine Grill, Radici, Jumpin’ Jays Fish Café, as well as new kid on the block Bella Sole, which just last month opened its doors on Market Street in Portsmouth.

After living for a year in San Francisco, where he was certified as a Permaculture Designer, Bedard returned to his native Kittery in November of 2007 to put into practice what he had been learning to preach -- and teach. He took an assistant manager position at Me and Ollie’s in downtown Portsmouth, and was immediately struck by how much waste even the most outwardly progressive eateries managed to produce. “After living in San Francisco and being friends out there with people and businesses that were composting almost as second nature, I was sort of shocked to come back here and see how behind we really were,” recalls Bedard.

He started small, with something called “source reduction“. In layman’s terms, it simply means cutting down on unnecessary non-food waste; putting plastic ware behind the line, thereby forcing customer’s to request them as opposed to simply grabbing them; bulk purchasing to save on cost; or switching over to reusable plastic lids instead of throw-away wraps to help preserve foot behind the line. Inspired in part by a similar system pioneered by Whole Foods, Bedard set up glass boxes above each bin with examples of what should go where; things like napkins, cups, and any food scraps (including meats and cheeses), are, contrary to popular belief, compostable.

While making composting easy and inclusive, Bedard also tried to change his customers in subtler ways, offering discounts to customers who brought their own mugs for coffee -- Bedard made sure theirs was Fair Trade certified -- and giving out plastic forks, spoons or napkins only on request. “Basically we tried to incentivize people making the responsible choices,” recalls Bedard. “Particularly with the coffee, people were very perceptive to bringing their own mugs.”

Bedard’s efforts at Me and Ollie’s eventually caught the attention of Sarah Brown, a local activist and founder of the Green Alliance (GA), which had just been launched the year before. Brown, whose Green Alliance already included a who’s who of local restaurants, felt that Bedard was the perfect fit for helping small companies -- and eateries especially -- reduce their waste.

Bedard was immediately given the task of interviewing food vendors for the GA’s “Sustainability Evaluation”, which includes a rigorous 40-question interview and scored “Report Card”. Bringing a number of GA restaurants through the process, Bedard soon realized that most of them were keenly interested in pursuing a comprehensive compost and waste-reduction program of the sort launched at Me and Ollie’s. Encouraged by their enthusiasm, Bedard founded EcoMovement Consulting and Hauling in September 2009 as a way of providing businesses -- GA members and non-members alike -- with the means to, in Bedard’s words, “bring their product full circle”.

“If we expect the soil to keep yielding crops, we need to be able to give nutrients back to it,“ explains Bedard. “When we compost, the soil is better able to facilitate water and nutrient absorption, which produces better crops. And let’s face it, it’s better than just throwing all this stuff into an empty hole where it will never be used again. This way the food that comes out of the restaurant is, in a sense, the same food coming back the following year.“

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It certainly doesn’t look much like food anymore as the wait staff of Pocos Bow Street Cantina scrape the crusted nachos and half-eaten pickles into the ten gallon yellow bin near the dish machine in their waterfront restaurant. Once filled, the converted trash can will weigh close to 300 pounds. For Marlisa Geroulo, owner of Pocos and its deck neighbor, Two Ceres Street -- who has also gotten on board the composting train -- the transition has been nothing if not smooth.

“We‘re typically a lot slower in the winter than in the summer, so it was a good idea to get a head start by starting in the winter,” says Geroulo, who along with husband and co-owner John Golumb has run Pocos since 1998.

When asked about the prospects of getting more restaurants to follow suit, Geroulo offered an interesting analogy: recycling -- something which, as amazing as it seems now, actually took some time to become the standard. “When recycling first became mainstream people hemmed and hawed about how inconvenient it was, but now, it’s second nature to just about everybody,” explains Geroulo. “We hope composting becomes the norm, especially when they realize they’re actually saving money in diverting so much trash.”

While a major pivot point for many restaurants, for Pocos the composting program is simply just another big challenge to meet: the waterside staple is already in the midst of a huge facelift which will see their old deck location moved closer to the actual building in order to comply with new zoning codes (along the way adopting many LEED standards), along with an expanded deck area on the restaurant’s second floor.

Just up the hill and around the corner, Brennan Rumble and the folks at Portsmouth Brewery are equally mired in change: the high-volume downtown brewpub claims to have already reduced its waste by half in instituting the new composting policy.

“It took some time to get everyone on the same page, but now we feel like it’s become pretty easy for our staffers,” says Rumble. “We think if we can prove a restaurant of our size and volume can do this, anyone can.”

So far many have: EcoMovement has already recruited 12 businesses into their comprehensive waste reduction program, and more are joining every week. A good start to be sure, but their goal is nothing shot of totalizing: Bedard and Miranda want to make all of Portsmouth -- and really all of the Seacoast -- a closed loop.

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Where that loop closes is Bartlett Farms, which serves more as a compost outlet than a standard stalk and stock farm -- at least for now. It’s the Monday after an incredibly busy Valentine’s Day weekend, and Bedard and Miranda arrive at the Eliot plot with over four tons of compost from the near dozen restaurants (the duo will often weigh their payload at a truck stop in Kittery before heading to Eliot). Luckily for them, they already got their workout tossing the contents into the truck, one three-hundred-pound bucket at a time, and now only need to push a button inside the cabin to part with the enormous load.

“It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it,” quips Bedard. “We should actually be on that Discovery Channel show Dirty Jobs. I’m not sure if Mike Rowe would be cut out for this one.”

It might be unglamorous and wholly thankless. It might be unpredictable and occasionally vomit-inducing. It might, on some January mornings, be downright miserable. It might be dirty. Check that, it is dirty. But it’s also helping to make the Seacoast a much cleaner -- and greener -- place.