Archive for the ‘Going Green’ Category

Happy Earth Day from Chowgirls

April 22, 2009

A important message to our Downtown Minneapolis friends: Stop by the Chowgirls booth for some free samples during the lunch hour on Wednesday, April 22. We’ll be stationed in the Fifth Street Towers skyway for an Earth Day celebration.

GOOD COMPOSTING NEWS
Chowgirls is part of a commercial compost program through Eureka Recycling that allows us to compost the majority of our kitchen waste. 70% of our kitchen waste goes into a compost dumpster, 15% is recycled, and only 10% of our waste ends up in a landfill!

As of the end of March, all the restaurants, co-ops, and Chowgirls in this program have composted 208.12 tons of food waste and non-recyclable paper, and recycled 113.47 tons of bottles, can, and papers. Collectively, we are diverting an average of 91% of our discards away from the trash and into new products!

The environmental impacts of this effort are huge! Using the EPA WARM calculator, Eureka converted these numbers into some interesting equivalents. Composting and recycling this much has the same impact as taking 70.5 cars off the road for a year, or providing electricity for 53.4 homes for a year! It would take 9,333 trees ten years to sequester this much carbon!

For more information about the environmental benefits of composting and recycling, see Eureka’s full report.

Rally for a Greener USDA

December 30, 2008

Food Democracy Now! is a grassroots movement initiated by farmers, writers, chefs, eaters and policy advocates who recognize the profound sense of urgency in creating a new food system that is capable of meeting the changing needs of American society as it relates to food, health, animal welfare and the environment.

They are seeking signatures of people who want Obama to appoint friends of sustainable, healthy food to the USDA. The organizers of the petition (which includes big names like Michael Pollan and Alice Waters) are in talks with the Obama team and they feel that 100,000 signatures is crucial in getting what they’re asking for.

At the time of this posting, there are 60,583 signatures. Time is short and we need to reach 100,000. Please take a moment to sign the petition at Food Democracy Now.