Consumers are being more conscious now than ever before of their own sustainable practices. They are buying from local farmers markets, recycling, and switching to LED lights.

But when a person leaves home, say to go out to eat, they could pack on the carbon calories without realizing it — especially if the restaurant they visit isn’t treading lightly on the environment.

According to the Green Restaurant Association (GRA), the certification body aiming to create an environmentally sustainable restaurant industry, an average restaurant uses 300,000 gallons of water and produces 150,000 pounds of garbage a year. Even worse, the restaurant industry as a whole, which includes approximately 900,000 restaurants in the United States, is the largest consumer of electricity in the commercial sector.

The GRA has certified 265 restaurants in the U.S. Those green restaurants have taken multiple steps to use less energy, save on food and packaging and improve their carbon and food footprints.

Austin's Barr Mansion is certified green (Photo: Suzy Q.)

Some of the changes are virtually invisible. At Barr Mansion, an Austin events restaurant that the GRA cites as a star performer, 97 percent of the waste is diverted from the landfill by recycling or composting.

Other green actions are more noticable, such as Barr Mansion’s hemp tablecloths, organic food and a roof made from recycled concrete.

Many restaurants, yet to be certified, are taking initial green steps in the normal course of business. They are using motion sensors on bathroom faucets to save water, programmable thermostats to temper energy use, bulk packaging to cut down on individual wrapping, and serving water upon request to preserve that resource, and save the water it would take to wash the glass.

If every restaurant put these basic changes into place, the energy and water savings would add up. According to GRA, if just one quarter of restaurants in the United States only served water upon request, the country could save 26 million gallons of water each year.

Restaurants can take other inexpensive steps toward sustainability: In the office, staff can switch to 100% post-consumer recycled paper in the office and recycle office ink cartridges.  In the kitchen, changing to a readily available $30 low-flow spray valve can save hundreds of dollars on the water bill. Adding and maintaining Energy Star appliances also helps.

Saving food can be among the most gratifying ways to change. Kitchens usually prepare more food for the day than is eaten, but they can plan for leftovers by segregating organic waste, which can be composted. Partnering with a local food bank or Salvation Army also can put quality leftovers to good use.

GRA is currently working with 600 restaurants, including the 265 that are already certified. Restaurants need 100 points on a scale developed by the GRA to become certified.

Most restaurants fall between 40-60 points in their first assessment, according to Colleen Oteri, GRA’s Communications Manager.

There are five requirements that restaurants must meet to be GRA certified:

1. Accumulate a total of 100 points
2. Meet minimum points in each category
   1. Energy
   2. Water
   3. Waste
   4. Disposables
   5. Chemical & Pollution Reduction
   6. Sustainable Food
   7. Sustainable Furnishings & Building Materials
   8. Full-scale recycling program
   9. Free of polystyrene foam (no Styrofoam allowed)
   10. Annual education program

GRA has a detailed explanation of its 4.0 Standards on their website.

Barr Mansion is GRA’s highest scoring restaurant with 284.76 points. Hosting and catering to over 1,600 guests each month, Barr Mansion is a picturesque site for weddings, luncheons, parties, and various events.  As the nation’s first and only Certified Organic events facility, Barr Mansion prides itself on being green. From simple things like using non-toxic cleaning chemicals, paints, and candles to the more complex such as diverting 97 percent of its waste, Barr Mansion is leading the way. Other unique eco-aspects include:

• Hemp and organic table linens
• Chairs made from eucalyptus
• Roof made from recycled concrete
• Geothermal heat
• Organic food grown on the property
• Serving grass fed beef
• Composting all food waste

GustOrganics, eco-friendly world foods at 519 Avenue of the Americas, NYC

Many of the GRA-certified restaurants attest to the money savings that accompanied their green transformation. At GustOrganics Restaurant & Bar in New York City, owner Alberto Gonzales, notes that he has saved $1,300 a year by foregoing paper towels in favor of an energy efficient hand dryer in the restroom. GustOrganics, which serves everything from granola and fruit to organic bar drinks and Buenos Aires steak,  also has received much media attention as the first certified organic food restaurant in NYC.

GRA understands that with each new year better environmental solutions become available and more plentiful. Because of this, certified restaurants must continually improve their sustainable practices.

“They [consumers] expect more and they want to know that the restaurant can truly back up their green claims. Being certified through a 20-year-old national non-profit with transparent standards is the way to do that,” said Oteri.

So while a restaurant does not need to have the GRA seal to be taking some green actions, the certification is verification that the facility is among the vanguard of eco-friendly eating establishments. Use the Dine Green online tool to find a GRA-certified restaurant near you.

Copyright © 2010 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

In 1995, The ULS (Use Less Stuff) Report developed a statistic that is frequently quoted to describe how much extra waste is generated between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day: 5 million tons. Use Less Stuff Day (the third Thursday of November) was created to educate people and help them reduce that waste.

Rather than declining, that number has grown by 20%, to 6 million tons. Obviously, Use Less Stuff Day hasn’t been a big enough event to get people into the conservation spirit. Starting this year, ULS is proclaiming the entire week before Thanksgiving (Nov. 19-25, 2009) to be Use Less Stuff Week.

According to Bob Lilienfeld, editor of The ULS Report, here are some reasons why people need to be more aware of waste during the holiday period:

• Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Americans generate 25 percent more waste per week than during the rest of the year. This creates an additional 1.2 million tons per week, or an extra 6 million tons, for the holiday season.
• According to the USDA, Americans throw away 25 percent of food purchased — 52 billion pounds each year, or 170 pounds per person. When you add in food waste from restaurants, retailers and other commercial purveyors, the University of Arizona estimates that the real amount wasted is closer to 50 percent.
• If every American family reduced holiday gasoline consumption by just one gallon a week, the result would be an annual reduction in greenhouse gas production of 13 billion pounds (6.5 million tons) of carbon dioxide.
• If American households reduced their holiday ribbon usage by just 2 feet, the result would be a savings of 50,000 miles, enough ribbon to circle the Earth twice.

Fact: America has an abundance of food.
Question: So why does anyone go hungry in this country?

A potato gleaning in Virginia (Photo: Society of St. Andrew)

Armed with this simple thought, the Society of St. Andrew (SOSA) took up the cause of feeding the hungry in 1979 with the idea of gleaning fields for salvageable produce.

“We do this in two says,” says Carol Breitinger, communications director. “We use volunteers in the field for hands-on gleaning, or we send out trucks to pick up surplus crops that farmers can’t use and would just end up in the landfill.”

Once SOSA obtains the produce, they distribute to food pantries around the country. Breitinger says they salvage 20 to 25 million pounds of food a year with the help of 30,000 to 35,000 volunteers. The volunteers come from church groups, schools, scout troops, and even from the people who need the food.

Becky and Dave Aduddell of Wake Forest, N.C., are two of SOSA’s veteran volunteers. “We’ve been doing this for five or six years now,” says Dave, who is a web programmer for a local community college by day and a bass player by night. The couple was hooked after a friend who was gleaning introduced them to the concept. “It sounded like such an eminently logical idea that we joined him very shortly after he started.”

Gleaning a field in North Carolina (Photo: Society of St. Andrew)

“Our interest in gleaning stems from that great desire within each of us to ‘do some good.’ We like it because it is very concrete and tangible. Writing a check to a charity gives one a good feeling and a sense of satisfaction, but going out and working to glean, then delivering the produce directly to the recipients is a very concrete act.”

The Aduddells bring their gleaned crops to a public housing complex in the small town where they live.

The couple acknowledges that the gleaning process wasn’t a big stretch – both of them come from farming families. “While we didn’t grow up on a farm, we spent time doing farm work as kids, so this is a nice déjà vu for us,” says Dave.

In mid-October the Aduddells joined several hundred volunteers for the 19th annual Yam-Jam, sponsored by SOSA. The group salvaged unharvested sweet potatoes from a 50-acre field in rural Johnston County, North Carolina. The area had already been harvested by professionals. In addition to sweet potatoes, Becky says the group has collected corn, green beans, collards, tomatoes, watermelon, squash and blueberries.

“A good 20 percent of produce is lost in the fields,” says SOSA’s Breitinger. She says the USDA calculates that 96 billion pounds of food is wasted in this country before it gets to market.

Why do farmers leave good food behind? “Sometimes commercial growers must leave one field to move on to the next crop,” says Breitinger. Other times, the produce isn’t “perfect” enough for market – not quite the right size or color, but perfectly edible. Also, sometimes the farmer can’t afford to pay another crew to come through his fields again.

Gleaning a perfect cabbage in Virginia (Photo: Society of St. Andrew)

Farmer Leo Stallings says he has leftovers because there isn’t a big market for produce in Franklin County, the area of North Carolina where his farm is located. Stallings, who has been in the farm business for 40 years, grows a number of crops including sweet corn, beans, cantaloupe, collards, peas, squash and string beans. “This area is not very commercial. There are few markets. Growing is not a problem, but selling is. We don’t have a co-op to handle acres of crops.

“I try to plant about as much as I think will sell. But because the market varies, I often have leftovers.”

Stallings says SOSA volunteers come out in the summer and late fall to salvage his fields. He says he doesn’t mind giving it away. “I don’t want it to go to waste and they give us a tax credit for it.”

When large growers donate a tractor trailer load of food, SOSA might contact a group of volunteers, often a church group, to sponsor a “potato drop.”

“Imagine 45,000 pounds of loose potatoes dumped into a church parking lot,” says Breitinger. “Volunteers then put 10 to 15 pounds of potatoes into mesh bags. We contact the local food pantries to come to pick it up.”

Shall we have an omelet with vegetables and cheese for breakfast?

Let’s order a Caesar salad for lunch, with some chicken noodle soup.

And dinner – Who’s up for meatloaf, with macaroni and cheese on the side and some chocolate chip cookies to top it off?

Oh, while you’re at it, stop for a second and ask yourself: What impact does this food have on the environment?

Here’s some food for thought: An entertaining interactive tool lets you add up your “carbon points” and see just how badly those three cups of coffee are hurting the world.

The Sierra Club’s Green Home site has a lineup of virtual meals and menu items that you can drag and drop into a frying pan to calculate your “CO2e points.”

CO2e represents the carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of greenhouse gases (which can include methane). The researchers who helped develop the tool established that eating 4,500 “carbon points” a day is a pretty high count. If you eat that much or more, “it equals emissions of about three tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) every year – the equivalent of taking three round-trip, three-hour flights,” the site says. Each point is 1 gram of CO2e.

The world’s food system, they say, is responsible for one-third of all the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – and eating in the U.S. contributes 5 percent of the globe’s greenhouse gases.

We took the frying pan for a whirl:

Under the “Menu items” tab we chose from an array of food options for our three meals: granola with yogurt and a banana for breakfast, Chinese chicken salad and lentil soup for lunch, and for dinner, several portions of tuna, shrimp and salmon sushi. Oh, and some sugar cookies. We can’t forget our daily dose of coffee, soda and wine, as well.

The grand total: 3,654 points. Not too bad.

Under the “Sample Meals” tab, we were presented with a selection of options that might be selected at a restaurant. For breakfast, simple cereal with a banana; for lunch, a roast beef sandwich and chips; for dinner – we couldn’t resist – an Indian feast!

Gulp. Even without the coffee, soda and wine our score was off the charts with a whopping 9.432 points. How grossly un-green.

The calculator was created with the help of Bon Appétit Management Company, which provides cafes and catering services to companies, colleges and other venues. Their emphasis is on fresh food and cooking from scratch with sustainable ingredients. Also, they cite research from more than 40 peer-reviewed research papers compiled by two science teams.

The carbon calculator isn’t perfect — it doesn’t have all possible ingredients and combinations that you encounter in a normal day. But based on your preferences, you can get a pretty good idea of where you stand.

There is also a helpful Q&A section (click on the “What do these points mean?” line under the little carbon thermometer). Among their bits of wisdom:

Don’t try to eliminate every carbon point from your total – aim for knocking off 25 percent of the points from your daily diet.

You bought it, you eat it – throwing out food eats up a lot of energy, and in a landfill it creates more methane gas released into the atmosphere.

Buy seasonal and regional – That’s obvious. But did you know that tomatoes or lettuce grown in hothouses can create more emissions than those grown in the ground that are farther away and trucked in? Or that canned tomatoes processed in season are more climate-friendly than greenhouse-grown ones? And a true offender? Tropical fruit flown from far, far away.

Cut down the beef and cheese – You don’t have to become a vegan, but the calculator says that “Livestock production causes 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases . . . Consider reducing portion sizes of meat and cheese” and eat them less often.

Don’t eat fish that’s flown – “fresh” seafood flown great distances is substantially worse, environmentally, than that which is “processed and frozen at sea.” And, they say, it’s probably not going to taste as good as the latter.

Forget processed food – Junk food, packaged snacks and cereal bars are energy gluttons.

Is organic food better? – Not necessarily, they say, because what you eat and how much you waste is more important in terms of your carbon footprint.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Dumpster diving as the perfect solution to a sustainable lifestyle?

It could be, according to a report from The Daily Show. Seems forest-living, oil-spurning electrical engineer Tod Kershaw has perfected the art. “My favorite dumpster is Trader Joe’s. It’s just so wonderful; it’s the nirvana of dumpsters. There’s great food, a lot of it is organic and very rarely do you find maggots in there.”

If you say so, Tod.

But kidding aside – and Kershaw isn’t – the fact he can feed his family on discarded grocery items is telling. Telling us that food waste in America is out of control.

Food scraps or leftovers, according to the EPA, comprise the single-largest component of waste by weight in the United States. Food tossed from restaurants during preparation and in uneaten portions, and from households, institutions and industrial sources.

Figures vary and are often dated, but all point to the problem’s massive scale:

• 96 billion pounds of food – or 27% of the 356 billion pounds of edible food available – is wasted each year in the U.S. according to the U.S, Department of Agriculture. On his Wasted Food blog, Jonathan Bloom places that figure at more than 150 billion pounds.

• The amount of food required to eliminate hunger in the U.S. is only 5 billion pounds annually, says charity Feeding America. If just 5 percent of food scraps were recovered, states the USDA, it would equal a day’s worth of food for 4 million people; recovery of 25 percent would feed 20 million.

• According to the U.N. World Food Programme, the total U.S. food surplus could satisfy “every empty stomach in Africa”.

• It costs the nation around $1 billion annually to dispose of all its food waste. (EPA)

This excessive waste not only eats at our pocketbooks to the tune of $130 billion plus a year, but at our ethical core: Some 49 million people could benefit from these discarded resources. The question then becomes, “How do we change?”

From the Farm . . . to the Market . . . to the Table . . . to the Dump

Analyzing where loss begins is critical to figuring out viable solutions. Back on the farm, Mother Nature wreaks havoc through ice storms, washouts and any number of weather-related events, along with pests and insects. Selective harvesting – choosing only blemish-free fruits and vegetables – also accounts for significant waste. A 2004 study by the University of Arizona found 40 to 50 percent of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten.

Then there’s loss in food storage, handling and transporting it an average 1,500 miles. When a food item reaches the grocer’s shelf, it contends with overstocking, improper rotation, damaged packaging, seasonality and a host of other factors. And once a perishable product reaches its “sell by” date, out it goes. The fact is, predicting demand can be tricky.

But the two major sources of food waste are food service establishments and consumers – that’s right, you and me. Household loss may come from shunned leftovers, spoiled fruits and veggies, over buying, spilled milk . . . it all adds up.

Timothy Jones, a PhD in Anthropology who headed the 2004 UA study, updated its findings for today’s higher Consumer Price Index. “I’ll give you some new figures readjusted to the government’s own CPI,” he said. “On the farm, the losses are about $38 billion annually; on the commercial or retail food side, it’s about $44 billion; and in households, it’s now up to $54 billion.”