By Jim Cavan

When it comes to staples of New England Americana, you’d be hard pressed to find a more worthy and noticeable icon than Kittery’s Bob’s Clam Hut.

A Route 1 staple since Bob Kraft first opened its doors – or walk-up window, as it were – back in 1956, Bob’s has since grown into a quintessential area eatery, offering some of the finest, fastest and freshest fried fish fare anywhere on the Seacoast.

On a typical summer day the parking lot spills over, the line bends near around the since-expanded building, and the smell of golden fried eats wafts so far adrift even Route 1 passers-by can’t ignore it. They’ve been featured in Restaurant Business Magazine’s “Best of Everything” list, and they recently complete filming a spot for Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.

But there’s something else that Bob’s – and many other road-side digs like it across the country – are also known for: producing trash. Lots of it. From the paper baskets and napkins to plastic to-go containers to the countless plastic forks, knives and spoons – it wouldn’t be uncommon for a restaurant like Bob’s to fill up multiple trash cans of refuse a day.

That was before Bob’s saw the writing on the wall – the “green” writing, to be precise. Starting this spring, Bob’s, along with its brother restaurant, Robert’s Maine Grill (just across the street on Route 1) have been slowly but surely re-evaluating their serving and packaging materials, in an effort to render their business more environmentally sustainable.

In addition to composting all kitchen food scraps, the folks at Bob’s and Robert’s have also looked into incorporating re-usable plastic baskets in lieu of one-use paper trays. Robert’s is slated to put a comprehensive solar hot water system online in the coming weeks, and both restaurants have joined local entrepreneurs EcoMovement Consulting and Hauling, significantly reducing their combined waste. Bob’s is even offering to donate $2 to the Green Alliance – a Seacoast-based “green business union and discount member co-op – for every meal if you forego taking plastic cutlery with your to-go order.

For Bob’s General Manager Pat Barrigar, going from zero to green this quickly – and right in time for the busy summer season – was something her staff was more than eager to take on. “The staff has really been wonderful about it, especially considering the learning curve for something like this and the fact that we started right before summer,” explains Barrigar. “And it’s been especially great seeing how enthusiastic the staff has been. Five years ago the employees wouldn’t have thought twice about ‘going green’, but now they’re catching each other on the little things and really making it exciting and fun.”

While owner Michel Landgarten has been concerned with green issues for years, turning Bob’s into a more environmentally friendly enterprise posed myriad more problems than with Robert’s, where Landgarten had his foot on the pedal from the get-go. But Landgarten was also able to see how other area eateries were reducing their own environmental footprint, including the Portsmouth Brewery, Pocos Bow Street Cantina, and Beach Pea Bakery – three business which, like Bob’s and Robert’s, are Green Alliance Business Partners.

So far, the transition hasn’t been a total bed of roses, at least in terms of customer education. “It’s been a struggle, to be honest,” explains Landgarten, who bought the business from Bob Kraft in 1986. “With Robert’s we were starting from scratch and were able to incorporate a lot of these green initiatives right off the bat. But with Bob’s we were dealing with a business model that makes it much more difficult. ”

That business model has been both a blessing and a curse to its owner. Harkening in many ways to their explosion in the 1950s – when Americans first experienced “fast food” in all its casual, summer-nights-on-the-strip innocence – road-side staples like Bob’s also reflect a similarly fifties-borne attitude of consequence-free consumerism.

This partly explains why, despite the ever-growing influence of green products and practices, some haven’t quite caught on to the new measures: Landgarten claims Bob’s has lost almost all of its new plastic baskets to the trash, despite prominent advertising to customers to set them aside for cleaning.

Still, that hasn’t stopped Landgarten and his team from trying to change all that. “We have a five bottom-line mentality,” says Landgarten. “Two of those are community connection and the environment, and both of those help us be a value-driven company as opposed to just a financially driven one. That’s just who we are as local businesses and citizens, and we intend to keep making those things priorities.”