Sustainability & Environment

How B2B foodservice brands should communicate sustainability claims that survive customer scrutiny, regulator inquiry, and FTC Green Guides enforcement — with specific language patterns that work and language patterns to avoid.

Wine tastings traditionally pour from the host’s bottles into disposable plastic cups, generating substantial single-use waste at a typically modest-scale event. Bringing your own reusable tasting glasses cuts that waste — where the venue allows it. The etiquette, the practical bottle and glass choices, and which kinds of tastings permit BYO.

Most US households make tea from bagged tea, with each cup leaving a paper bag and string in the trash. Reusable infusers — mesh balls, basket strainers, French press style — eliminate the disposable waste and often produce better-tasting tea. The practical comparison and which approach fits which household.

Bokashi is the composting method for households that traditional outdoor piles or worm bins don’t fit. It handles meat and dairy, works in apartments, takes minutes per week, and produces something usable for gardens or for adding to municipal composting. Whether it’s the right fit for your situation depends on specific lifestyle factors.

Data-backed analysis of how much plastic one restaurant actually diverts by switching to compostable packaging — by vertical, by volume tier, with the math behind sustainability claims that survive customer and ESG scrutiny.

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.

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.