Restaurants and Institutions

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Ready to Go Green?
October 7, 2008

When I founded the Green Restaurant Association 18 years ago, the word green was still just a color and its best-known advocate was Kermit the Frog.

I started the Green Restaurant Association in 1990. It was the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day gathering in 1970, and America was just starting to come face to face with issues such as recycling, reducing and reusing.

It took the next decade-plus to see curbside recycling begin to spread across this country.

To see hole-in-the-wall natural markets turn into multi-billion-dollar businesses that are growing faster than conventional foods.

To see the words "non-toxic," "green," "sustainable," "energy efficient," etc., go from the lexicon of academia to getting more and more mentions in trade magazines, at trade shows, on the nightly news and in political and business speeches.

The words "green" and "business" were rarely seen on the same page, let alone in the same sentence. At the time, there were too many groups demonizing businesses as culprits for our environmental woes without providing them any practical solutions, and there were too many businesses turning a blind eye to the world’s most-pressing environmental problems. Neither approach—blame or turning a blind eye—were to be the solutions that would change the facts on the ground of how we use and dispose of resources.

So I founded the Green Restaurant Association to be the bridge that would translate the importance of the world’s pressing environmental issues into the language and tools that would not only make environmental sustainability palatable to the average restaurateur, but actually make it a delicious meal. The ingredients to this soup of solutions needed to be answers to the concerns that business owners had, and still have:

     •I don’t have the time.

     •I don’t have the expertise.

     •Why should I bother?

     •I don’t want to sacrifice taste.

     •Is the packaging going to leak?

     •Are the chemicals going to work?

     •Will the lighting work well?

     •Will the toilet flush?

     •Will the napkins work?

     •Where am I going to get these items?

     •Is it going to break my bank?

     •Will this put a burden on my employees?

These are all valid concerns. They are smart concerns. They are the questions that the Green Restaurant Association was founded to answer. And 18 years later, the GRA has the largest database of environmental solutions for the restaurant industry and has been helping this industry go green longer than any organization on the planet.

Welcome to the Green Restaurant Association’s new blog, where we will be exploring the real issues relevant to restaurants creating environmental change in a sustainable manner. I look forward to moving toward environmental sustainability together in this blog, one bite at a time.

Posted by Michael Oshman on October 7, 2008 | Comments (2)