Ethan Plumber

I consistently walk most everywhere I go outside of using street cars for things less accessible by foot. It can be difficult to walk in some areas due to sidewalk closures or just really messed up walkways. It's also stressful at times to walk past so many businesses and takes a bit of time to get away from the gravitational pull capitalism has on us. Definitely need more parks and pedestrian oriented walkways where cars can't be passing through that have plenty of greenery and smooth pathways. Maybe pathways made of something that's not just more concrete.

I work within the food industry, and while I skimmed over the "Sales and Client-Facing Roles" webpage provided by Drawdown, I found my own article from a blog that brings up important points. The article is "Restaurant Sustainability Guide: How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint", for anyone else who works within the food industry.

I already know for a fact that my work is very cautious about inventory and using food before it goes to waste. I also know that they use some locally sourced ingredients and offer LOTS of locally sourced wine and alcohol.

Here's what I learned from the article though. Certain meats require much more land, water, and produce more greenhouse gasses than other types of meat. I am unsure if my restaurant serves Beef as I recently started there, but I think I have seen at least one item on the menu that includes beef. On top of this, I don't believe we use compostable containers, and with meals that are surely to go unfinished this feels like something to bring up to my employer.

We may have meat based meals, but a good chunk of our menu capitalizes on other things like tofu and seafood (seafood has less of an effect on our environment in comparison to land-based meats). I also haven't seen any straws in our establishment yet, so maybe it'll stay that way.

I'm unsure about our energy-efficiency, but something I'm sure my employer would be willing to fill me in on. I know when I was first hired on he emphasized different aspects of his restaurant having a positive impact on their carbon footprint.

We also don't do delivery, yes, this includes not having Door Dash or any other service doing deliveries for us. We also have digital receipts, though we have physical menus. I can bring up digital menus if there is ever talk about redesigning or changing up the menu.

Our main cleaning products are soap and bleach. Bleach isn't a great one for our environment, but I will need to do some further research for a good alternative.

In total, my place of work doesn't score as low as expected, but there are things I know my employer would be willing to hear from me. I've gotten to know him a decent bit and this kind of stuff won't fall on deaf ears. I encourage anyone else in food service to use this article to ask and revamp their work environment!

Article URL: https://www.lightspeedhq.com/blog/restaurant-sustainability-guide-reduce-your-carbon-footprint/

I completely forgot you have to use the site to show you've done things.

I've only done some theorizing on plastic reduction in my personal life, but some of my most used plastics are milk cartons and packaging for certain products like ham and mayonnaise.

Fortunately, I only go through one of each of these products maybe once a week, but I could easily cut this out by getting milk in a paper based carton or just reduce my milk consumption (I love milk, too much).

Some other food products might be a bit harder to replace, but I could possibly get slices of ham at the deli and just keep those in reusable Tupperware. When it comes to mayonnaise I really don't know how to get that in a different form than plastic, but I go through one maybe every month or two so I'm not too concerned.

Outside of plastic, something that ends up in my recycle a lot is soup cans. It's really efficient to have it canned for storage sake, but avoidable nonetheless. I could start making my own soup and packaging it in reusable Tupperware.

When my budget allows it, I will be tackling the soup issue, and the other things I can just reduce consumption or replace. Overall, I'm very proud with the lack of plastics I seem to pick up. Most of my recycle bin is cardboard!