Sustainable Restaurants Serve Green-Minded Diners
My second blog posting is an article pointing out all the flaws in non-green restaurants. I found this information very interesting and some of it shocking.
The first fact I found shocking was that the average food service establishment uses 300,000 gallons of water a year. The article says the Environmental Protection Agency states that this is double the amount a family of four uses in one year. Another shocking fact was that a fast food restaurant generates 200 pounds of waste for every 1,000 of sales. About 95 percent of that waste could be composted or recycled. According to the EPA this trash piling up in our dumps releases methane a green house gas that is 21 percent stronger than carbon dioxide. One last fact I found interesting was that many refrigerators can contain chlorofluorocarbons, a substance that depletes the ozone layer. And of course food service industries are the largest commercial user of refrigerators.
The article wraps up by pointing out what vendors in the area are doing to go/stay green. A place called Sprouts Green Café found in Emory Village, uses paper products that are 100 percent recycled. Plus their ingredients are all organic or from locally produce or free-range meats. A coffee shop a few shops down features fair trade coffees that improve the relationship between the coffee farmer and roaster.
Even thought this article doesn’t focus on green sustainability in fine dining, I feel it’s a good article for all the facts it covers.
Wow, I was really surprised some of the information in this article. I think it will be definitly be helpful for our project, maybe we could use some of this information and form a comparison chart or find one that's already created to help emphasize our topic. I thought the information on energy was really impressive. That regular restaurants use one third of the US energy in the retail sector and they are five times more energy intensive then a sustainable restaurant. I also thought the numbers on waste were huge, 95% of the waste from fast food restaurants could be recycled, I think key points like this will help us. I also thought the ways that restaurants were going green were also really interesting, I know I've read in a few articles that compost piles were really starting to become a trend to reduce food waste and help restaurant that have rooftop gardens or the greenhouses mentioned in this article. I really liked this article and I think it was very informative on statisics I hadn't heard yet.
ReplyDelete"Wow" is right! I can't believe some of the facts this article posted. I found the waste comment mindblowing, too. I knew that throwing away food was the number one cost of food, but I didn't even think about what it was doing to the environment. I think composting should be a huge part of our project because it is something that anyone can do no problem. The only thing that restaurants might be weary of would be changing the routines of their employees. But I think with enough will power and motivation any restaurant could do this, no problem!
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