The Impact of a Restaurant
by Lauren Stuart
It’s 7:00 p.m. on a Friday night, after what feels like the most hectic workweek of your life. After a crazy, busy, overwhelming and stressful week, you really don’t feel like cooking, and you really, really don’t feel like washing dishes and cleaning up after an entire household. So you, like millions of other Americans, take the family out to eat. You figure that yes, you will be spending money, but yet saving the time and energy that would have been put into cooking at home. Seems like a fair trade – until you throw in the environmental impact that dining out has on the world.
Restaurants use about 2.5 times more energy per square foot than most other commercial buildings (1). In addition, as much as 80 percent of that energy is wasted, being transformed into heat and noise by inefficient equipment (3). This is wasteful for both the environment and the restaurateurs, since energy costs have been increasing at a rate of 6 to 8 percent per year (1). In addition to the enormous amount of used energy (just ONE typical electric deep fat fryer uses more than 11,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per year), restaurants also use large amounts of water, frivolous amounts of plastic, and produce an average of 50,000 pounds of trash a piece per year (1 & 2).
Think back to your last sit-down dining experience. Chances were that you were served a plastic straw in your drink. You may be thinking, “what’s really so bad about a single plastic straw?” Imagine that there were a total of 300 people that ate at that restaurant that day. That’s at least 300 straws used in one day. If 300 people ate there every day, that would be 2,100 straws consumed in one week. In a month, that’s 9,000 straws. In one year, if 300 people ate at that restaurant every day, that would be 109,500 straws. And since plastic is non-biodegradable and lasts forever, every one of those straws either makes its way into one of our overflowing landfills, our oceans, our environment, or into the stomach of one of our animals. Who would have thought that one little straw could have such a large environmental impact?
We are not asking you to boycott restaurants. But now that you are more aware of the environmental impact that restaurant make, you can make better choices. For example, when you’re at a restaurant in the future, just ask your server not to put any plastic straws in your drinks. If you know of a restaurant that only serves plastic cutlery or serves every piece of food in a Styrofoam container, try and eat elsewhere. If you’re at a fast-food restaurant and they try and put your food into a plastic to-go bag, ask that they don’t. Any change you make in your own environmental impact will be a change that could better our world.
1. United States Environmental Protection Agency “Guide For Restaurants.”
2. http://www.greenyour.com/lifestyle/food-drink/dining-out
3. “Commercial Kitchens: Cooking Up Green Opportunities.” Feature from Environmental Building News