S.L. County Health Department urges restaurants to go green

Servers and chefs at The Coventry home for seniors fill two buckets with potato peelings, melon rinds and bread heels: One for a supervisor’s home compost heap and another for "the girls" — her chickens.

Fryer oil at the Cottonwood Heights independent and assisted living center is recycled. So are cardboard boxes: Half goes to the recycling bins and the rest to the supervisor’s wood-burning stove.

In Salt Lake City, Pago builds its menu around what local ranchers and growers are producing: from the Paisley Farms Pork Porterhouse to the Utah-owned Vida Tequila. It has low-flow toilets. And a waiter is recycling the restaurant’s used wine bottles into Pago’s new drinking glasses.

"This is one that’s on the menu right now," says Pago owner Scott Evans, holding a drinking glass that was once the bottom half of a bottle. "It’s a Walter Hansel Sauvignon Blanc."

The Salt Lake Valley Health Department wants to see more of the county’s roughly 4,000 restaurants doing these types of green things, from reducing energy and water consumption and recycling to buying local products.

Despite looming budget cuts, the health department will launch a new Sustainable Restaurant initiative next year. During annual inspections, employees will look for health code violations as usual. But they’ll also try to spy ways owners can reduce waste.

For those that strive to be green, the health department will promote them on their website and give them a sticker that says they are sustainable. Participating is free and voluntary.

Besides helping the environment, the move is meant to improve the image of the "cleanliness cops," says Monika Wyrzykowski, a health inspector leading the restaurant initiative.

When restaurant owners see inspectors at their door "some are automatically very mad because we’re coming to see everything that’s wrong. Yes, that’s part of our job and we’re still going to do that," she said. "But we want to focus on what they’re doing right."

‘We want to help’ ? Wyrzykowski said inspectors will initially focus on the "easy" fixes that should also save restaurant owners money.

When it comes to water, tips will include using low-flow water devices, fixing leaky faucets, xeriscaping, and waiting for patrons to ask for water instead of giving it automatically. Based on the need to later wash the glass, Wyrzykowski says it takes 5 gallons of water to provide the one cup of water to drink.

For energy, the inspectors will encourage the use of energy-efficient appliances and compact fluorescent light bulbs, unplugging unnecessary appliances and cleaning coils on refrigerators.

The department could expand to promote buying local products, recycling (to include glass and food scraps) and using biodegradable cleaning products. The initiative, which is not expected to add any costs to the health department, could even focus on other businesses it regulates, such as tanning salons and tattoo parlors.

The proposed program is far less rigorous than the standards set by the Green Restaurant Association, which certifies restaurants with a point system. To be labeled green, restaurants must take steps that include using programmable thermostats, insulating water heater tanks or using tankless units, using occupancy sensors for lighting, installing waterless urinals, going paperless for payroll, banning the use of polystyrene foam take-out containers and recycling paper products, grease, plastics and kitchen waste.

The association says an average restaurant uses 300,000 gallons of water a year, and they are the largest consumer of electricity in the commercial sector. The only certified restaurants in Utah belong to the Sweet Tomatoes restaurant chain.