Let me share something with you. Many of the confessions I hear or read come from business people who are realizing that their way of life is contributing to the demise of the planet. It is not the business they are in necessarily, but instead they are becoming aware of the resources they personally consume and waste during a standard business trip. Let me give you one example.
One of the congregation, a man I’ll call Ryan, travels about 160 days per year. He almost always flies and he always stays in nice hotels. During his recent stay in a 5-star hotel in Chicago he happened to be having breakfast and reading the New York Times. One of the headlines that day was a story about hunger and the effects it has on a country.
Ryan suddenly found himself asking the waitress about what the hotel did with the food waste. The waitress said she didn’t know but introduced him to the hotel operations manager who was having breakfast two tables away. The operations manager extended his hand to introduce himself. “I’m Terry,” he stated, pulling out a chair next to him. After introductions, Ryan put forward the question, “What do you do with all the food waste?”
“Do you really want to know?” Terry volleyed back. Ryan considered this question for a moment, glanced at his watch to make sure he didn’t have to be anywhere important and then replied, “Sure.”
Ryan informed Terry that he had been at the hotel for two days for a workshop and had seen quite a lot of food left over at each event. He wanted to know if the hotel donated the food to the local homeless shelter. “Oh no, never!” Terry exclaimed. “We couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?” Ryan queried. “Is it transportation? Is it a negative image of homeless people coming to the hotel for food?” Ryan really could not understand what the barriers could be to getting unwanted food to people who needed it. Especially when they were in the same city.
“Nope. It’s liability exposure. That’s what corporate calls it,” Terry said, scraping some eggs onto his fork. “We don’t want anyone getting sick and suing the company so we put all the food waste into dumpsters on the lower level of the parking lot. The waste company says they haul it to the hog farmers for feed but I think they just dump it in the landfill.”
Terry’s words are supported by the statistics, which show that over 26 million tons of food is thrown away. All the inherent water, energy and resources that went into each pound of that food were also thrown away. And the greenhouse gases were just vented into the atmosphere for no beneficial reason at all.
Ryan sat there taking it all in as a table of patrons pardoned themselves, leaving half of their breakfast on their plates. “But there has to be a way for the homeless to waive their right to sue your company so they can eat. Isn’t there?” he asked.
“Even if there was a way, there are still the regulatory agencies to deal with and that leads back to potential liability,” Terry stated matter-of-factly. “Nothing worse than having someone whose paid to find things wrong with your operation hanging out with you all the time. The more they’re here, the more likely it will be that they find something wrong.”
Ryan told me that this conversation went on for a bit longer over coffee with no real resolution. Because of potential lawsuits and increased regulatory oversight the liability factor was just too high for this hotel chain to invest in an option to throwing away enormous amounts of food and other resources. In this particular case, Ryan said, it amounted to an average of 21,000 pounds per week!
But what’s interesting is to hear about where this corporation decided to invest their money in regards to the food waste issue. Terry let Ryan know that a few years prior corporate had decided to invest in a compactor to handle the food waste. They wanted to reduce the cost per week of hauling it away so their idea was to compact the food waste and put it into one trash bin instead of three. This would reduce the number of times per week that the hotel had to have the waste company come in and empty each bin.
Well, according to Terry, the first time the hauler came in to lift up the bin with one week’s worth of food waste the garbage truck moaned and groaned until the hydraulic system ruptured and put the truck out of commission. The bin was just too heavy for it to lift. So the company wound up paying for a compactor it didn’t need and had to buy a new garbage truck for the waste hauler. And then they went back to the three bins.
Ryan returned from this experience shaken and depressed. He is questioning his need to continue making his living in a way that is so damaging to all generations of all living beings. He has connected the dots and the picture it reveals is not one of a happy doggy or an elephant at the zoo. No, this connect-the-dot scene is one that is all too familiar in Western culture. It is one where workers find themselves indentured to a corporation that operates in such resource intensive ways that much of this planet’s generous gifts of resources are literally thrown away.
It is the face of the American Way of Life.
A very relevant article about what happens when you forget to look at all the aspects of waste handling and compacting.
Villy
Posted by: Villy Ohm | October 26, 2007 at 04:16 AM