Encouraging Employees to Play a Role in Sustainability is Good Business

Sustainability is a core part of the business model for Restaurant Technologies, a company that recycles used restaurant cooking oil for more than 45,000 restaurant chains, independent restaurants, grocers, hotels, casinos, universities, and hospitals across the U.S. Last year, our work led to over 314 million pounds of used cooking oil no longer going into landfills annually, and foodservice teams eliminated nearly all oil-related plastic and cardboard waste that would fill 7.5 million cubic feet of landfill space each year.

Restaurant Technologies has always had a sustainability-focused mindset. But we wondered if there was more that we could do closer to home—both at headquarters and at each of our company’s depots.

Encourage Ideation and Creativity

To come up with new ideas, we turned to the experts—our own employees. We asked for ideas and input on areas of the company where we could make more sustainable choices. No ideas were too big or too small.

Employees, in turn, jumped on the idea. As ideas flowed, our leadership team looked at each one to determine the feasibility, cost and timing to adopt changes.

One of the easiest changes to make was one that turned out to be really impactful. When one employee investigated our personal protective equipment, they realized that our depot teams use more than 1.6 million nitrile gloves every year as part of safety and cleanliness. As one-time-use safety products, nitrile gloves must be disposed and can sit in landfills for up to a century. It was time to make a change—not only because of our ESG priorities as a company, but because it is the socially responsible thing to do.

In the past year, we began using gloves that are 82% biodegradable after one year. After five years they will fully break down, leaving no trace. The new gloves are also less expensive—by 51%! After trials in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Los Angeles to test performance, we successfully implemented the new gloves across the entire enterprise.

Takes Cues From Your Lifestyle

Everywhere you look these days, people are toting around reusable water bottles. But many companies still provide bottled water for employees. One of our employees suggested using reusable water cups instead of buying bottled water. Since we already provide branded community coffee mugs, switching to branded reusable water cups was an easy decision. Both the mugs and the new water cups are washed daily and replaced so there’s always a full supply. This helped us eliminate almost 11,000 single-use plastic bottles in just one year.

Be Driven to Find New Ideas

Our fleet employees are always working to determine how we can be more efficient with our delivery routes and operations which can reduce fuel consumption and emissions. One thing we hadn’t looked at yet was the tires on our fleet of vehicles. We recently began a partnership with Bridgestone/Bandag for replacement tires on all 560 vehicles in our fleet.

After doing due diligence on the safety of retread tires, we discovered that 90% of fleets with over 100 vehicles operate on retreads. While there are cost savings, it also creates an enormous environmental impact.

Manufacturing a new tire consumes more than 20 gallons of oil, but a retread requires just under 7 gallons. The energy used is just 30% of what it takes to manufacture a new tire, reducing both carbon emissions and CO2. Most of a retread tire uses the original casing. What’s removed in the retread process can be recycled and repurposed in items like playground mats and rubber mulch.

Pace Yourself

Knowing we can’t implement every idea at the same time, we keep a running list of possibilities. A few of our potential future initiatives include solar panels on depots, electric vehicle charging stations, scrap metal recycling and biodegradable shrink wrap.

As our business and the world evolve, our employees keep looking out for new sustainability ideas for both our customers and our business. The greatest changes almost never happen in a vacuum and joint collective action is how the greatest differences are often made. We’re proud of our efforts to make the world a better place together, and of our employees’ willingness to contribute new ideas. In return, they’re proud to work at a company that truly values their ideas and creates true change.  

Alissa Partee is the Chief People Officer at Restaurant Technologies. She leads human resources and oversees the company’s growing talent base. In addition, she manages talent enablement, total rewards and operations excellence.

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