By Cat Pritchard
Carbon neutral restaurants – a creative media ploy or a smart way to go about your business without hurting the environment or your client base?
In 2008, Roy De Gouveia came up with a simple idea – to create the first carbon neutral restaurant in South Africa by converting the waste oil in his Cape Town restaurant into biodiesel to power his car.
The idea of converting small amounts of biofuel from used cooking oil in the privacy of his garage soon grew into renewable energy company BioGreen Diesel.
Today BioGreen Diesel helps restaurants and retailers minimise the damage done to the environment and surrounding communities.
"The industrial revolution is over, we need to change our thinking," said
Roy De Gouveia, Director of BioGreen Diesel.
Now BioGreen Diesel is going the extra mile by becoming a carbon neutral organisation, and helping even the largest of South African retailers to think in a cradle-to-grave system.
This system, based on the Steward's Principle which was developed at the University of Stellenbosch, looks to managing edible oils from the time of manufacture to final disposal. This shifts the focus from ensuring good waste management to enabling good practices along the supply chain.
A subdivision of BioGreen Diesel supplies new oil to restaurants, buys back
the waste oil, and then converts it to biodiesel, thus following the
Stewards principle of controlling the oil from cradle to grave.
One hidden benefit of this system is that waste oil that has been overused has a dangerously high Free Fatty Acid (FFA) content and, when not controlled, is often added to pet and animal feed, or resold to unsuspecting consumers. These high FFAs are carcinogenic, enhance HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and negatively affect the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. Not exactly something they declare on the packaging either.
Of course, BioGreen Diesel takes even the prized Steward’s Principle one step further by turning even by-products into useful substances such as a nutrient fertilizer, creating a cyclical cradle-to-cradle system not practiced in SA.
Several Western Cape businesses including Pick n Pay, Spar, and Cape
Concrete are already on board. The most obvious area to tackle would be that of transport.
BioGreen Diesel supplies biodiesel for Pick n Pay and Spar delivery trucks in the Western Cape and, when the construction trucks delivered concrete to Cape Town's 2010 football stadium, they used diesel enhanced by used cooking oil and poultry fat.
Operations have recently begun in Gauteng and plans are in place to
expand to Port Elizabeth and Durban by mid-2010.
Fuel for thought.