Tuesday, 20 May 2003
BERKELEY, Calif.
Today I'll be working in San Jose finishing up water audits for 13 restaurants in downtown. Add those to our original 30 restaurants in Alameda County (Berkeley and Oakland) and we have 43 eateries in our Greening Ethnic Restaurants (GER) program.
Consider this: Restaurants consume more energy per square foot than any other industry. They are among the greatest generators of recyclable and compostable solid waste -- 24 percent of the food waste that goes to landfills in California comes from restaurants. They are also very high consumers of water and, due to improper dumping of grease and oil into stormwater drain systems, significant polluters of the ocean.
And consider this: Ethnic restaurants receive a disproportionately low amount of environmental outreach due to cultural and language barriers. Environmental inspectors working for cities and counties complain of the difficulty of reaching out to ethnic restaurant operators, which leads to lower levels of compliance at these eateries.
Now think about this: If you wanted to send an environmental message to ethnic communities, how would you do it? You could reach those who are religious through a church or temple, but you could reach virtually everyone through local ethnic restaurants. The 30 restaurants in our GER program in Alameda County get 600,000 visitations a year. Eventually, we plan to conduct outreach to 180 restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area, which altogether get 5.7 million visitations per year!
The first thing we did in creating the GER program was to bring all the environmental stakeholders together -- energy companies, water companies, stormwater inspectors, the Alameda County Green Business Program, and the Smart Lights Program. These stakeholders now work with local community leaders -- dedicated environmentalists who have an interest in the welfare of their own ethnic communities and who speak the languages used by restaurateurs. We've had great success so far: 90 percent of the restaurants we've asked to join our program have agreed.
Our environmental outreach focuses on four areas outlined by the Green Business Program: water conservation, energy conservation, pollution prevention, and solid-waste minimization. In these four areas, our restaurants have implemented 57 environmental measures.
Each year, Green Ethnic Restaurants:
- save 1,026,000 gallons of water
- conserve 75,000 kWh of energy
- divert 83 percent of their solid waste into recycling and composting
- prevent the emission of 50,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
- comply with stormwater management regulations
- buy biodegradable, recycled, and organic products where possible
Berkeley Mayor-elect Tom Bates congratulated our ethnic restaurants as "leaders in the restaurant industry in natural resource conservation." Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) have specially recognized Greening Ethnic Restaurants for its unique merits. And this year the GER program received the U.S. EPA's annual environmental achievement award.
We make a bridge between restaurants and the environment. That bridge carries a lot of love and a lot of environmental savings!
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