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Posts Tagged ‘greenhouse’

One of the areas that seems the least understood when using green products is the “carbon footprint”. To illustrate this point about green products, a simple story about the use of CFL (Compact Florescent Lamp) bulbs may help. When in a restaurant the other day, I noticed that the spoon was missing from the place setting. I looked around and it appeared it was the same all over the restaurant.

When my server came over and asked what I wanted to eat, I asked about the spoons. I was informed that the chain’s “corporate” office had informed all the restaurants that the busboy, when putting down place setting, was not allowed to put a spoon on the setting. Now I must say this does look pretty odd, mostly since I grew up with a spoon included with the setting. I checked with someone who still teaches etiquette classes, and yep, it is still required.

I asked if she knew why this change had occurred and why no green products like CFL bulbs. I was told that in order to conserve energy that spoons were only given to customers that would use them. It appears they believe that it costs a lot to clean an unused spoon. So the possibility of cleaning an unused spoon was removed. And yet how odd, no investment in green products that could save money such as CFL bulbs.

Given how the dishes in a restaurant are washed, I find this amazing. In almost every restaurant in this country an automatic dishwasher is used. It is designed to load from the left side and the dishes move through it in a large basket to the right. Simple, fast and efficient and it is not even on the green products list. Most people that do the dishes do the silverware in a single basket run. Hence, no money would be saved and no energy savings but why no green products?

While pondering on this I looked up and noticed that the entire restaurant was covered in lights. Each light was an incandescent bulb and no green products like CFL bulbs anywhere. I stopped when I reached fifty bulbs that I could see from my table; I know there were more in back kitchen area, in the bar and adjoining rooms.

Looking around it was easy to see that most of the incandescent bulbs were in the 75 watt range. I asked and was told this restaurant was open 138 hours each week.

Now it does not take a mathematician to do a little basic math. Let’s compare a chain using incandescent bulb vs. the same chain using CFL bulbs. If we take the 50 incandescent bulbs and multiply it by the bulb’s wattage, it would equal the watts consumed per hour or 50*75= 3,750. Now we know the store is open 138 hours a week, so multiplying this by the watts per hour, we would get 517,500 watts consumed per week. Finally multiply this by the weeks in a year, and we get 517,500*52 = 26,910,000 or 27 megawatts without green products.

From the Internet I was able to learn that they have 88 stores in their chain. So if we assume this is an average store we can multiply the 27 megawatts times the 88 stores and we see that this chain is using around 2368 megawatts per year just on lighting.

What if we used one of the new green products, the CFL bulb, instead of the incandescent bulb how much could we save? Let’s take a look. We know that a comparable CFL would be in the 18 watt range based on the Energy Star tables. If we replace the 75 watts in the above equation with 18 watts CFL we would get; 50*18*138*52*88 = 568 megawatts consumed per year. This would save the chain about 2368-568 = 1,800 megawatt hours per year. I would say this would be a pretty good investment in green products, don’t you?

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