My earlier post on Starbucks and recycling prompted a friend of mine to tell me that I was wrong.  Ok – he didn’t phrase it exactly that way but he did point out that I was missing information.

In some Eastern Canada jurisdictions (which are obviously way more “green” than Calgary at the moment) – food establishments are REQUIRED to recycle.  So they have bins for people to sort their waste into recycling containers.  (Thanks Dave for this info!)

The problem is that people DON’T DO IT.  That’s sad isn’t it?  With everything available to them, people don’t take a few seconds to recycle.

So these food establishments then have to pay someone to sort through the garbage and sort out the recycling.  It is often easier for them to just pay someone to sort rather than have their customers try to do some of it.

Next step in my travels:  San Francisco International Airport (really – there is a recycling connection here)

The waste containers at SFO all say “Contents are Recycled” (or something like that – I should learn to take pictures if I’m going to start blogging about it).

I think this is brilliant.  Clearly SFO is like the Eastern Canadian food establishments and paying someone to go through the waste and sort out the recycling.  And I as a customer at SFO feel really good knowing that they are probably able to reduce their waste by a LOT by not relying on people do recycle themselves.  Because people have proven that they don’t always do it.

SFO has a climate action plan – read it here.

According to SFO’s website:

The airport is committed to drastically reducing its environmental impact over the next decade.  We’re working to reduce our contributions to global warming, improve air and water quality, reduce noise impacts, and preserve natural resources.

During the past several years SFO has met many milestones in environmental achievements and resource conservation including the implementation of a green rental car program, the renovation of Terminal 2 to achieve LEED Silver certification, and the conversion of all Airport operated shuttle buses to biodiesel use, among many others.

Thanks to SFO for leading the way – but also for letting me know! So much of all of this is letting the consumer know what actions you are taking to be green.

As meeting planners – we often don’t toot our own horns about our green meetings.  Let’s make sure we do as there are people who care about the environmental steps we are taking.