This week kicks off an annual Lafayette summertime tradition: the Eat Lafayette campaign. The campaign brings focus to the locally owned and run restaurants in our town – of which there are many! We aren't known as one of the best foodie cities for nothing.
If you're in the Lafayette area, be sure to visit the 72 (!) participating restaurants between now and September 2 and take advantage of the special offers!
Beyond the benefit of being a locally owned restaurant, some of the participating restaurants are also eco-friendly, from using locally sourced ingredients to being truly farm to table, and serving local craft beer. Some of these include:
Cafe Vermilionville – uses local ingredients in some of their dishes.
Everything Else is Cake – offers gluten-free, grain-free and sugarfree desserts (eco-friendly in that it's less processed than traditional desserts).
Guidry's Reef – serves Louisiana seafood (and to be fair, most Lafayette seafood restaurants use Louisiana seafood.)
Jolie's Louisiana Bistro – is a farm-to-table restaurant; uses seasonal Louisiana ingredients.
Rusted Rooster – uses local ingredients.
Saint Street Inn – is another farm-to-table restaurant; uses local ingredients.
Sandra's Cafe and Health Food Store – serves and sells organic, all-natural and local products.
Tsunami Sushi – saves their cooking oil for biodiesel use (I believe!)
Twins Burgers and Sweets – makes their own bread for their burgers (and maker of my birthday cupcakes and cookies a couple weeks ago! Shoutout to my parents for supporting local businesses!)
There are also a couple restaurants I can think of that are eco-friendly, but not participating Eat Lafayette restaurants, such as French Press and Great Harvest Bread Company (who are certified as a green restaurant). I am now both hungry and inspired to visit them in order to share photos and reviews with y'all! The Eat Lafayette kickoff event is this week, and I'll be sure to share photos of the local food for y'all, because I'm just generous like that!
And if you're not in the Lafayette area, it's okay! Once you're done wiping the drool off your keyboard, be inspired by Eat Lafayette. Make it your own campaign to support locally owned restaurants in your area. Eating local allows for so much variety in dishes and helps your area's economy.
When you're out supporting local businesses and eating delicious food, be sure to clean your plate, or bring home and eat all your leftovers. Because, after all, leaving food wasted isn't very eco-friendly, is it?
Allons manger! Let's eat!
Hotels are not instantly perceived as being mindful of their emissions or focused on being carbon neutral. But now, many corporations are choosing hotels for their events based partially on what their carbon footprint will be.
Testing by about 50 hotels shows the report takes about two hours to complete
from data such as energy bills and suppliers. After
being entered into a spreadsheet, the hotel can analyze its carbon
footprint for guestrooms and meeting spaces during a specified year, per
night and per guest.
The working group behind this initiative include Accor, Beijing Tourism Group,
Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, Diamond Resorts International, Fairmont
Hotels and Resorts, Hilton Worldwide, Hong Kong & Shanghai Hotels,
Hyatt Corporation, InterContinental Hotels Group, Jumeirah Group,
Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Marriott International, Meliá Hotels
International, MGM Resorts International, NH Hoteles, Orient-Express
Hotels Ltd, Pan Pacific Hotel Group, Premier Inn-Whitbread Group,
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts,
The Red Carnation Hotel Collection, TUI AG and Wyndham Worldwide.
It's a big step on a larger scale for hotels to move forward in creating less emissions and a smaller carbon footprint. This is also nice bit of news that will transition to a larger post soon on how to lower your own carbon footprint when traveling and staying in hotels.
Hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and happy Father's Day to all dads!
Great for everyone who brings their own office snacks and families with children, one easy way to be greener and waste less packaging is to stay away from single serve packages of snacks and drinks!
It seems convenient to buy a box of single serve snack bags, but the amount of packaging being thrown out is much higher than buying a full size box of the same snack. With the full size box, you get to make your own single serving! Just put your snacks or drinks in a reusable container and be on your merry way, or send your children on their merry way. You'd have one plastic bag to throw out (and one box to recycle), compared to eight plastic bags to throw out (and one box to recycle).
I tend to use the small stackable Rubbermaid containers to bring snacks to work (such as my Kryptonite up there, Spicy Cheez-Its®)
, but there are also cute reusable snack bags, like these snack sacks from SnackTaxi. If you use a plastic zip bag, be sure to reuse it, or you're basically creating the same amount of waste as you would if you bought pre-portioned snacks.
And you can do the same with juice, soft drinks, milk or water by putting it in a Klean Kanteen or any kind of reusable cup. This week, I bought a large carton of iced coffee and have been bringing a Kanteen-ful to work each morning, drastically cutting down on waste from my newfound weakness of using the pod coffee maker at work.
Parks are an important part of any city - they improve the quality of life and create a peaceful outlet amidst the roads and busy-ness.
The Trust for Public Land ranks the largest 50 cities' parks in an annual ParkScore,
based on acres of park space, investment from the city, and the
percentage of people who live within 10 minutes of a park. They just released their rankings for 2013. None of the top 10 cities are located in the south, and no Louisiana city makes the cut in being one of the 50 largest cities in the nation. The closest city to southern Louisiana is Houston, which comes in at #38.
Visit the TPL website to view all the data about the top 10 cities. While there may not be any Cajun representation on the list, it serves as a great inspiration for all cities. There are many great ideas and elements that cities can adopt in their own park planning in order to become more park-friendly.
Locally, The Horse Farm is a park space undergoing some transformations and becoming a central spot of green in town - and they just launched a Saturday morning Farmer's Market! I am excited to see how this park will grow and flourish as a much-needed space.
One more year down, more awesome years coming up. This treehugger is 28 years young today!
Today is World Environment Day, a project by the United Nations Environment Programme.
The theme for this year’s World Environment Day celebrations is
Think.Eat.Save. Think.Eat.Save is an anti-food waste and food loss
campaign that encourages you to reduce your foodprint. According to the
UN Food and Agriculture Organization, every year 1.3 billion
tonnes of food are wasted. This is equivalent to the same amount
produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, 1 in
every 7 people in the world go to bed hungry and more than 20,000
children under the age of 5 die daily from hunger.
Your weekly simple eco tip is to check out the website and take action today to have less food waste in your household or office. This great poster gives 26 simple ways to do so!
Poo yi. Summer is just not my season, y'all. I do love swimming and sundresses, but Louisiana summers are basically Survivor: Bayou, and I'm just not cut out for this humidity.
But in any case, summer and its heat and humidity have arrived. So now it's time to talk conservation practices, to save on energy bills and misery. A little conservation from everyone goes a long way toward making sure the whole area doesn't suffer as much. In the dog days of summer, city utility grids have quite a strain put on them, and the demand causes higher rates and possibly rolling blackouts.
Some actions you can take to conserve energy around your home include:
- Plant trees for shade. The part of your home that faces west is the part that will benefit most from shade and protection, since the afternoon sun burns hotter and longer than the morning sun.
- Get blackout or thermal curtains for your windows to block out light and heat. Keep your curtains and blinds closed during the day. They can't work to their full potential if they aren't covering the window!
- Turn your AC thermostat up when you leave for work or school in the morning, then turn it down when you return. It won't feel as good when you get home in the afternoon, but you will save money from running the air conditioner in an empty house during peak heat hours. To be extra energy efficient, look into a thermostat like the Nest. It learns your schedule and programs itself to turn the AC on or off at the right times. You can even control it from your phone. There are also standard thermostats that have a program feature. You can simply program it to be set higher while you're away and to lower right before you get back home, for more comfort.
- Use the majority of your electricity in off-peak hours. Don't wash your clothes or cook while the temperatures are at their hottest. The electricity rates will be higher, and the demand from everyone else will contribute to putting a strain on the grid. Do laundry or your hair in the morning or evening. (Or let your hair go natural!)
- While we're on cooking, look for recipes that don't require as much use of your stove or oven. The oven especially heats up the kitchen, requiring your air conditioner to run more to regulate the temperature. Using a slow cooker or cooking dishes that don't require heat will help to keep your home cooler.
- Place CFL lightbulbs in all lights and lamps. Incandescent bulbs give off more heat than light, and thus, cost more to run. CFL bulbs are cooler to the touch and use much less energy to give you the same end product.
- Turn on ceiling or tower fans for less energy-sucking air regulation. They will help reduce your need to run the air conditioner continuously. Just make sure to turn them off when you leave the room.
- Water your lawn in the morning or evening. Watering in the middle of the day just means that the water will evaporate faster and not soak into your lawn. And for the love of the Earth, if it is raining, turn OFF the automatic sprinkler! You are just wasting water and money, and making environmentalists like me angry. According to the American Water Works Association, as much as 30% of water can be lost to evaporation when you water your lawn midday. And if your town has a lawn watering schedule, follow it!
- Use a windshield sun shade in your car when you must park in the sun. It will make the interior of your car feel much better and help reduce the need for frantically blasting the air conditioner as soon as you get in.
Summer isn't comfortable, but by using a few of these conservation tips, you can be comfortable while still remembering to be green.
This year poses a new summer energy efficiency challenge for me, as I've found I've had to relent on some of my practices. Having a kitty means the blinds are up most of the day, in order for him to be able to see outside. In the afternoons this means the place gets really bright and hot. I still tend to keep my air conditioner up, so I know it will only get more uncomfortable for the both of us as summer goes on. So I'm working on a few ways to combat the problem efficiently. I would love to apply some solar film to the bottom portion of my windows, so my kitty can sit in the window and watch the birds without feeling all of the heat, and it will cover what the blinds haven't been. And I'm shopping around for blackout or thermal curtains to replace the current unlined ones shown below. I will hopefully be trying out a new set soon (hint, if Mom and Dad get a pair I picked out for my birthday), and will report on how well they work (or don't).
Do you practice any of these conservation tips already? What kinds of differences have you noticed from before you started?
![eco cajun [the earth just wants to be loved ba-you!]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-X8ax2_cLWIE/UEc1BnJ65II/AAAAAAAAAMc/SG-IfQQJVGo/s1100/Eco%2BCajun%2BHeader%2B002.png)
