Vancouver pilot project launches to help diners choose sustainable restaurants

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Would you like to choose where to dine out based not only on how good the food is, but whether a restaurant’s carbon footprint is low? Well, the winners of a contest to help Vancouver become a zero-waste city will be doing just that.

Project Manager Jill Robinson says the EcoMeter concept is similar to a health-rating system that is already being used in New York.

“Being able to actually showcase to the public how well the restaurant is doing and how they divert waste, take-out incentives they have to kind of encourage reduce, refuse, re-use and eventually just get people to be thinking a little bit more about the conscious choice of not only what tastes good at a restaurant, but also the carbon footprint,” she explains.

Robinson says restaurants in the city have already started to make steps in the right direction to produce less waste, but she says “the idea with this is how can we almost scale that up, and even potentially, in the future, get the city support in creating this behaviour change?”

Robinson says costs haven’t been finalized yet, but Vancouver’s EcoMeter rating could be in place by the end of this year.

“Really, the problem we’re trying to tackle is restaurant waste and single-use packaging, take-out plastic, all that sort of thing. How could we make a rating system that’s similar to this kind of system they have in New York City, but only for us, we apply it to how sustainable the restaurant is.”

Robinson’s Talent Pool was one of 18 teams vying for a digital marketing package worth more than $50,000 — beating out teams from Vancity and Hootsuite for the top prize.

A part of the pitch that Robinson believes put them above their competitors was their pilot project pitch.

“If you think about the hubs of Vancouver, especially in the restaurant area, you think Main Street, Commercial Drive, you know, those places that are super community-oriented and really high traffic.”

So, Robinson says her team plans to work with on the areas in Vancouver to get a sense of how well the system can work.

“And then when it comes around to the implementation timeline (in eight to 12 months) ideally, we can provide proof of concept … so we can actually move forward and then start to scale it up and see, okay, how well did this actually work? And did this provide the change that we’re hoping it will?”