News

March 20, 2009

Little Things Yield Big Savings for Utah Restaurants

If conservation pitches were customers, Andrea Dulle would be turning guests away from the two restaurants she co-owns and operates in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. “I’ve been bombarded by energy-saving people who want me to try something that absolutely works, but requires an investment,” she says.

With dollars and time in tight supply, Dulle was drawn instead to a program her health department was undertaking to ease local businesses into ecological practices. Like similar initiatives popping up across the country, the effort starts by whetting participants’ profit motive. Participants commit to cutting costs in at least three ways that help the environment. The emphasis is on setting objectives that require a mere reach rather than a moon shot. Dulle’s goals, for instance, are tapering her electricity use by 10 percent, trimming her water use by 10 percent, and eliminating one garbage pickup per week.

The government program provides those who commit with the know-how—often in one-on-one consultation—to achieve their objectives.

The support is provided free, as is a cooperative marketing plug for the businesses that take part. For example, the Salt Lake County Green Business program provides stickers that participating restaurants can post in their windows to promote their participation in the green initiative. Enrolled establishments also are listed on a green Web site maintained by the SLCGB.

The beauty of the program, says Dulles, is the ease of adoption. “The approach is to set realistic, attainable goals,” she explains. “We chose things we knew we could train the staff to do. We implemented simple things like putting together a list of what we had to turn off at night before we locked up. Just by putting together that list, I’ve noticed a decrease in what I’m paying for my power.”

She also installed motion-sensor light switches in places where the staff would often snap on an overhead bulb and leave it burning when they left -- not to return until the next day, or perhaps even longer. Just those two steps, Dulle says, have already cut her utility charges by $300. The sensors cost her $25 each.

Her restaurants -- Tiburon, a fine-dining restaurant, and Epic Casual Dining -- also have taken such conservation steps as installing low-flow rinse nozzles, which were provided free by the SLCGB.

“We’ve already cut back our waste hauls by one a week by recycling cardboard,” says Dulle. The restaurants’ output of garbage also was reduced by composting vegetable material in a quarter-acre garden where some of the operations’ produce is grown, an effort for which it relied heavily on the SLCGB for how-to information.

Administrator Jesse Miller-Johnson says the program, which officially began in January 2009, is focusing on restaurants before expanding to other businesses. About a third of all the electricity used in the retail sector is consumed by restaurants, and they tend to be very visible, making them ideal billboards for conservation efforts, he explains.

“We want people to know how easy it is to be green and save money at the same time,” says Miller-Johnson, adding that just installing low-flow valves can cut expenses by about $1,000 a year.

Miller-Johnson says only about a half-dozen restaurants have joined the program so far, but he expects the number to climb as word of the potential business benefits spreads to Salt Lake Valley’s more than 3,000 restaurants.

For Dulle, whose restaurants served as pilot facilities for the initiative, it was an easy sell. She describes herself as avidly pro-environment. But “as a business owner, it all comes down to the bottom line,” she says. “Anything you can do to help with savings is a good thing.”

The program was patterned after similar efforts in Boulder, Colo., San Francisco and Salt Lake City, the main metropolis for the county, Miller-Johnson says. Since the effort began, Annapolis, Md., also has disclosed plans to certify restaurants that make a green effort.