Sustainability & Environment

An Environmental Product Declaration is a standardized document showing a product’s lifecycle environmental impact across multiple categories. EPDs are increasingly required in procurement for construction, packaging, and some foodservice categories. Knowing how to read one separates substantive sustainability data from marketing claims.

A cold compost pile isn’t failing — it’s just composting slowly. Whether that matters depends on what you want from your compost. Understanding what produces heat in active piles (and why cold piles still produce finished compost, just slower) helps decide whether to fix it or live with it.

Sustainability commitments without measurement are aspirations. Measurement without consistency is noise. Tracking sustainability performance over time requires the same discipline as financial reporting — defined metrics, consistent methodology, regular cadence, and trend analysis. The practical playbook for foodservice and hospitality operations.

The terms get used interchangeably, which is a marketing problem. A bioplastic isn’t necessarily compostable, and a compostable plastic isn’t necessarily bio-based. The distinction matters for procurement, certification, and end-of-life decisions — and most public confusion about plastic alternatives traces back to this confusion.

The short answer is yes, with significant caveats. Wood ash is alkaline, mineral-rich, and useful in compost — in small quantities. Too much shifts soil pH dramatically. Coal ash, presto-log ash, and ash from treated wood are different problems entirely. The working guide to what fireplace ash you can and can’t add to compost.

US hospitals produce roughly 5 million tons of waste annually, and composting programs at major medical centers have started capturing meaningful portions of the food and organic waste stream. The categories of composting programs that hospitals run, where to find them, and what makes them work in healthcare’s challenging operational environment.

Soup making is one of the highest-leverage zero-waste kitchen practices. Vegetable scraps become stock, leftover proteins become next week’s lunch, refrigerator inventory clears itself out, and the freezer fills with portioned meals. The working approach to soup as a kitchen-waste reduction tool.

Most kitchens accumulate a slow drift of old dried herbs — basil from two years ago, mystery containers in the back of the spice cabinet, half-empty jars from recipes you tried once. Compost handles almost all of them. The exceptions matter though, and so does how you handle the jars and containers they came in.

Composting moves a lot of material out of landfills, prevents a meaningful amount of methane emissions, and improves a lot of soil. The actual numbers — drawn from EPA, USDA, and industry data — are larger than most people realize and useful for understanding why composting infrastructure matters.

Switching from plastic to compostable cutlery is one of the simpler sustainability transitions a foodservice operation can make. It still has to be done right — spec choice, supplier vetting, pilot testing, staff training, customer communication, end-of-life planning. The practical playbook for managing the conversion.

Compost tea is the brown liquid you get when you steep finished compost in water to extract microbes and nutrients. The result is a liquid biological inoculant, used to spray on plants and soil. The basic definition is easy; the details — types of tea, what’s in it, how it works — are where the…

Loyalty programs typically focus on free product rewards and discounts. Adding sustainability features — compostable item upgrades, points for bringing reusables, donations to composting infrastructure — lets the program serve customer retention and brand sustainability simultaneously. The practical mechanics.