7 Ways To Green Your Dining Out

Thanks to our friends at Greenyour.com for allowing us to share this story.

What’s on the menu this evening? Italian or Chinese? Steak or seafood? Diner or four star? Drive-through or sit-down? When contemplating such pressing dining out issues, also consider the eco-impacts of eating away from home.

I. Choose Certified Green Restaurants

There are no legal guidelines defining what it means to be a green restaurant, but several organizations have developed rigorous guidelines to determine if a self-proclaimed environmentally friendly restaurant is really serving Mother Earth her just desserts.

Some certifying agencies look only for organic foods that are locally grown, while others examine brick and mortar in search of green buildings. Still others take a more comprehensive look, certifying restaurants only if they are green all over—buying green power, relying on energy efficiency and water conservation, using recycled and biodegradable paper products, and reducing and recycling waste. (A study by the Green Restaurant Association (GRA) found that the average restaurant meal produces a pound and a half of trash, half of which is compostable food waste.)

Whatever shade of green dining you desire, choosing certified green restaurants makes it easy for you to have an environmentally friendly dining experience—you can choose a restaurant confident in the fact that all of its eco-claims have checked out.

II. Choose Restaurants Serving Local and Organic Food

Whether you’re out for a candlelit sit-down or a quick bite from the salad bar, green restaurants that serve organic produce and buy local, small-farm meat—among other locally grown and organic food products—make for fine green dining.

Visit GreenYour.com to learn more.

III. Ask About Restaurant Seafood

Ask about restaurant seafood to find out if it is sustainably harvested or raised. Help create a conversation between restaurants and their patrons that benefits the ocean ecosystem that your seafood comes from.

Asking Your Restaurant About Seafood On The Menu Helps You Go Green…

1. It creates awareness and demand for sustainably fished seafood.
2. It has the potential to benefit ocean ecosystems by preserving biodiversity and habitat.
3. It promotes seafood sustainability within the restaurant community.

Restaurant owners and chefs play a large part in the purchase and selling of seafood. In terms of value, nearly 67 percent of all seafood in the United States is sold through restaurants. This allows for a potentially large impact as more customers demand sustainable seafood. With more than 75 percent of the world’s fisheries either fully fished or over-fished, purchasing power can drive the seafood marketplace, and promote environmentally friendly fisheries and aquaculture operations.

A 2006 article published in the Journal of Science predicted a collapse (a loss of 90 percent) of most current commercial seafood stocks by 2050 if sustainability is not addressed.

IV. Urge Your Favorite Restaurant To Go Green

Whether you’re a regular or a first-time diner, you can leave your server more than the standard 18 to 20 percent with a tip about becoming a green restaurant. Restaurants have a variety of resources available to them offering advice and support for becoming more environmentally friendly. By providing restaurant owners with the information they’ll need to offer a green dining experience, you’ll help keep food waste, energy-related pollution, and dangerous chemicals out of your community—and keep food dollars within the local economy. And with half of the money Americans spend on food going to restaurant eating, you’ve got a lot of green purchasing power!

How to urge a local food purveyor to become a green restaurant

1. Decide which restaurant to approach. For greatest success, choose a restaurant that you believe will be open to making the changes you suggest. Compassion Over Killing (COK), an organization that works to urge restaurants to include more vegetarian fare on their menu, has found that family-owned and independent restaurants usually have more freedom and ability to implement changes in their menu and practices than national chains.
2. Leave suggestion cards when you dine out. The Green Restaurant Association has suggestion cards that you can easily download, print out, and leave behind to get owners in contact with the GRA.
3. Schedule a face-face meeting with the restaurant owner. When you schedule the appointment, be sure to emphasize that you will be brief so as not to take up too much of their limited time. Then, read up on the facts and prepare a brief presentation explaining why going green will benefit the business and the community, and highlighting some of the simplest steps the restaurant can take to be more eco-friendly. When you meet, dress professionally and come armed with literature you can leave with the owner explaining what they can do to go green. Give them lots of easy-to-implement information and helpful contacts. You can find information to pass on to restaurant owners in the Find it! section below.
4. Write a letter urging the restaurant—or chain of restaurants—to adopt green practices. United Methodist Women’s website has a sample letter to Yum! Brands Inc., a major paper product supplier to restaurants, urging them to carry chlorine-free products.
5. Become a shareholder activist. Shareholders get a say in the decisions and practices of the companies in which they invest. By becoming a shareholder, you can vote on, request meetings about, and ultimately affect the environmental policies and practices of your favorite restaurant.

V. Walk Or Ride Your Bike

Walking or riding not only has big payoffs for the environment but also for your waistline. Go to GreenYour.com to learn more.

VI. Take Public Transportation

Whether you take the bus, train, subway, ferry, trolleybus, or streetcar every day to work, once in a while for business, or just to pop into the city to wine and dine at your favorite downtown bistro, you’re helping to keep pollution out of the air and you may save yourself some time and money to boot. And if you’re in the market for carbon-cutting options, you should know that taking public transit over your car is much more effective at shrinking your carbon footprint that replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs or buying a better fridge.

Saving gas and cutting your greenhouse gas emissions are important eco-benefits of using public transportation. If 10 percent of Americans used public transit every day, the US would decrease its reliance on foreign oil by 40 percent. Yet choosing mass transit may also affect your finances since each year households that use public transportation save approximately $1,400 worth of gas. And don’t forget, if you take mass transit to get to work, your company may have a commuter benefit programs for employees, which can include subsidies for public transit passes to help make the commute eco-friendly and more affordable.

But before you hop on that crosstown bus or board a ferry, it makes sense to explore the most efficient and practical public transport options in your area. Depending on the size of your community and its commitment to clean travel, there may be several options available to you, and many ways to map out your next trip.

The best way to find out about mass transit in your area is to contact or visit the website of the type of public transportation you’re interested in.

And remember, light rail (probably your most efficient option) is up and running in more places than you might imagine.

Google has a new service called Google Transit designed to make it simpler to find your way through public transport’s sometimes cryptic maps and timetables. Like Mapquest, you type in your start and end addresses and the system will tell you where to walk and what buses or trains to take. It also gives approximate times for each segment, as well as the cost of public transit versus driving a car.

When it launched in 2005, Portland, Oregon, was the only destination. Now it covers dozens of cities and metro areas in the US. All regional and national rail networks, domestic airlines, and ferries in Japan and transport systems in Canada, Australia, and a few European countries are included too.

For iPod devotees, APTA’s website has a link to iPod transit maps. So far, only San Francisco is included, but other metro systems around the country are in the works, so keep checking.

Without a doubt, individual car drivership is one of the biggest carbon dioxide contributions made by the average American. This habit also requires tremendous infrastructure that’s not only destructive in its making, it’s a drain on physical space, too.

VII. Avoid Take-Out And Fast Food

Whether you’re on the go and in need of a quick lunch or craving some Chinese take-out from the restaurant around the corner, you may be able to lessen the packaging trash load with a few simple habit-changes.

How to avoid take-out and fast food packaging

1. Brown bag it: Here’s a simple solution: prepare ahead and pack your own food in reusable containers.
2. Drink sustainably: Take your own coffee mug or water bottle. Some beverage bars even let you bring your own cup for slushie drinks, including Starbucks, Booster Juice, and 7-eleven.
3. Carry home your recyclables: Many restaurants don’t recycle. If they dont, bring the containers home to recycle. And if you’re left with extra packets of ketchup or wads of napkins, take those home too to use later. Need help finding out what you can recycle in your local area?
4. Provide your own eating accessories: Although most restaurants won’t pack their take-out food in your containers, you can always bring your own eco-friendly cloth napkins, recycled, chlorine-free paper napkins, and biodegradable cutlery to the fast food table.
5. Bring your own container for leftovers : If you think you might be “doggie bagging” it, why not pack your own reusable containers with you to take home any leftovers. Some are ultra-compact and better than the cardboard, plastic, or Styrofoam thing they’ll give you.

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