We were fortunate to have lovely weather this past weekend and it inspired me to host a small backyard patio event – perhaps one of the last of the season.
I was reflecting on how little garbage was generated by twenty-one people having a pretty large dinner – appetizers, lasagna, Caesar salad and dessert. More importantly, I began to think about how sustainability is scalable. Large and small efforts to live greener can follow some of the same, simple steps to achieve similar results.
As began to itemize and take inventory of our green efforts for this particular summer soiree, I was amazed at how parallel our corporate sustainability efforts at LoyaltyOne appeared.
How did we do this?
Well, first of all – reusable dishes. I have an inexpensive set of dishes, glasses, wineglasses and cutlery that we use for backyard entertaining – so we don’t need any disposable plates or cutlery. It is also frankly cheaper – disposable plates are so expensive!
If we compare this to the offices at LoyaltyOne where I work, we have both reusable plates and single use, but strictly bio-degradable plates, cups and cutlery in our onsite cafeteria.
At the backyard barbeque we used water from the tap -- no plastic water bottles.
All of the beverage containers (for both young and old attendees) were recyclable so nothing went in the garbage.
At LoyaltyOne, we only use refillable coffee cups – no disposable cups are available anywhere in our building. We offer pitchers and glasses in our meeting rooms so that you don’t need to order plastic water bottles with lunch. And we promote the water cooler as not only a place to swap stories about TV shows from the night before, but as a communal alternative to personal plastic water bottles.
We scraped our plates (before loading the energy star dishwasher – using much less water than washing by hand) into the organic compost bin to keep the food scraps from the garbage as well. But not much was scraped anyway since everyone loved the lasagna!
Any leftovers were put away in the fridge. Leftovers are very green!
From a dinner of 21 attendees, we only filled one quarter of the small garbage bin in our kitchen. This seemed like a very small contribution to me.
We cannot claim to produce only one quarter of a small garbage pail for approximately 1000 LoyaltyOne associates – but we are doing our part. We have a waste audit happening now – I will share the results in a future article.
Our dinner efforts were not just focused on waste avoidance – we had a pretty low eco- footprint for the event overall.
The lasagna sauce was made from local tomatoes that we canned ourselves last fall. Our feast was organic and local to the greatest extent possible.
But there is one thing that we could have done. We could have used a solar oven to bake the lasagna to keep the carbon footprint of the event even lower.
In the solar area, my corporate experience undoubtedly trumps home. Our Mississauga facility set to open in November 2009 boasts Canada’s largest building mounted solar panel array of over 650 panels, set to generate more than 150 kilowatts of clean electricity per year.
If only I could find a way to get those panels to heat my home oven…
