Both Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts hotel-casinos donate all their leftover food to R C Farms, the big pig farm in North Las Vegas, to be used as pig feed. Collectively, it saves more than 30 million pounds of food per year from going to landfills.
RC Farms’ long-time owner Robert "Bob" Combs, who's been featured on such TV shows as "Bizarre Foods" and "Dirty Jobs" and whose 160-acre 2,500-pig farm is 12 miles north of the Strip, has been sending trucks to casinos nightly for nearly 50 years. His pigs might be among the best fed in the entire world. Combs says they won't even look at soy and corn, preferring leftover buffet food.
The farm was put up for sale in March 2017; according to the terms the Combs family is imposing, they'll have three years to move their pigs after the property goes to the highest bidder. But it appears, at this point, that they'll remain in the pig business.
Of course, Combs can't pick up all the leftover food from all the restaurants in Las Vegas.
Uneaten food that hasn't been set out at buffets often winds up in the employee dining rooms. If it has been set out, it's either composted (Station Casinos and Boyd Gaming's Suncoast), which is used as fertilizer or it's thrown out.
The initial impulse behind the move was asset recovery, as the property discovered it was costing a fortune to replace all the silverware, glassware, crockery, salt and pepper shakers, and other non-perishable items that were inadvertently ending up in the garbage. Since all the food waste had to be sorted through in order to find the discarded knives and forks, it was logical to start doing something practical with the leftovers, which are now mixed with paper to form the above-mentioned compost.
Like Stations and a number of other properties around town, Suncoast's waste grease and oil are converted to bio-fuel, for which they receive credits. When they combine these with the money saved from the asset-recovery program, which costs around $5,000 per month, they’ve found that not only does going "green" not cost them, sometimes they actually make a modest profit on these programs. And their daily garbage-production rate has been reduced from seven trash compactors-worth a day down to two.
Not much leftover casino food can go to feed humans due to the numerous health codes that cover the preparation and transportation of prepared food.