Think of all the glasses of drinking water we pour for diners that never touch them, or all the plastic water bottles we sell, or the infinite number of water pitchers we set-up for conference events.  The bottom-line is:  foodservice wastes lots of drinking water.  

The impacts are three-fold:

• When we empty unused glasses and pitchers, we waste the drinking water itself, which has become an increasingly scarce resource .
• When we wash permanent ware such as glasses and pitchers, we waste energy, water, and labor.
• We throw away a massive volume of single-use  plastic water containers.

How can we do better? 

Three solutions:

• In cafeteria/buffet environments, place “plumbed-in” drinking water dispensers in a prominent location  and offer only reusable cups (disposable cups can be available upon request). Merchandise this water so it’s an attractive option for patrons, rather than an afterthought.  Yes, you will lose some bottled water sales but that product category is already under siege due to the bottle waste.  Also, you can’t just eliminate water bottles outright because it dimishes customer choice, which is never a good thing.  We just need to have an attractive non-bottled option.
• In conference centers and restaurants, consider offering bottled water in glass reusable bottles, and/or offer water on request.  Companies such as Aquahealth and Natura offer some very interesting solutions, including sparking and flat options.  You wash your own bottles and fill only what you need for each table, rather than for individual diners or conference participants.  Bottles which aren’t touched aren’t wasted.  This approach adds value to water (it looks better in a custom branded bottle than any glass or pitcher) and it allows you to limit the water you discard, the warewashing, and the bottle waste.
• Make sure your staff is only drinking water from reusable tumblers or glasses.

Give water some thought – it’s increasingly expensive and its packaging implications stretch far and wide.   Trust that your efforts will add up to much more than a drop in the bucket!

These are two great articles from “Food Management” magazine, April 2009.  Andrew recently blogged about these, but here are the links to the full articles.

Green Space: Scaling Back Overproduction: http://food-management.com/segments/healthcare/scaling-back-overproduction-0409/

Strategic Thinking: Always Evaluate the Cost of Doing Nothing:  http://food-management.com/business_topics/equipment/always-evaluate-cost-0409/

“Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship,” said Benjamin Franklin

Our wasteful habits wouldn’t matter much if there were just a few of us—a Neanderthal hunting band could have discarded six plastic water bottles apiece every day with no real effect except someday puzzling anthropologists. But the volumes we manage are something else.

Chris Jordan is the photographer laureate of waste—his most recent project, “Running the Numbers,” uses exquisite images to show:

106,000 aluminum cans Americans toss every 30 seconds, or the

1 million plastic cups distributed on US airline flights every 6 hours, or the

2 million plastic beverage bottles we run through every 5 minutes, or the

426,000 cell phones we discard every day, or the

1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags we use each hour, or the

60,000 plastic bags we use every 5 seconds, or the

We toss 14 percent of the food we buy at the store. (so why do we need all those brown paper bags and plastic bags?)

15 million sheets of office paper we use every 5 minutes.

The simple amount of stuff it takes—energy especially—to manage this kind of throughput makes it daunting to even think about our waste problem. (Meanwhile, the next time someone tells you that population is at the root of our troubles, remind them that the average American uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve and dinner on January 2 than the average, say, Tanzanian consumes in a year. Population matters, but it really matters when you multiply it by proximity to Costco.)

Would you like me to go on? Americans discard enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet every three months—and aluminum represents less than 1 percent of our solid waste stream.

More than 46,000 pieces of plastic debris float on each square mile of ocean.

It’s something to think about…

So we start the day in a buffet, or the catering set-up for an event, by brewing enough coffee so “we won’t run out” and we check off the task.  Of course, coffee consumption varies greatly by time of day and service-type.  As a result, there is often a tremendous amount of brewed coffee that is thrown away when it gets old and/or cold.  This costs operators a lot of money (and labor and energy) and it’s waste that recurs usually very frequently.  If not every day, quite often! 

And yet most operators I speak with don’t think of coffee waste as food waste.  They rarely track it or attempt to manage it.  This is a big missed opportunity.  With some focus, communication with customers, merchandising changes based on time of day and weather, coffee waste can DEFINITELY be reduced.  

Food for thought…or really, beverage for thought in this case!