Eco 411
Eco Author | 2:45 pm | June 29, 2009 | Uncategorized | Add a comment
From restoring landmarks to saving parks, San Francisco Beautiful acts for the benefit of all who live, work and play in San Francisco. San Francisco Beautiful is the only organization in San Francisco whose sole purpose is to protect and enhance the city´s urban environment. Check out the San Francisco Beautiful website to view an interactive map of parks, cultural institutions, and many other locations that make San Francisco beautiful.
Eco Author | 6:00 pm | June 26, 2009 | Restaurant | Add a comment
Palio d’Asti is proud to stay committed to “green business practices” whenever possible. Some highlight include:
Eco Author | 10:12 am | May 27, 2009 | Spa | Add a comment
As part of their mission, The Barber Lounge is committed to full, general recycling. This San Francisco salon recycles all hair color foils in addition to collecting cut hair for use as either compost or for matteroftrust.org. Matter of Trust partners with salons and uses hair clippings swept off their floors to create “hair mats.” Woven into these mats, hair is an efficient and abundant material for collecting and containing petroleum oil spills. The salon is also the first salon in San Francisco to use solar power. It is in process of adhering 4000 Watts of Solar Panels to the Salon roof and routing to a power inverter that takes the solar power and converts to AC house power. The installation simply plugs into the salon’s existing electrical system. The solar electric system will generate 28% of the salon’s energy using the Sun’s rays for the next 30 years without any moving parts. As a team, all Barber Lounge employees recently walked as part of San Francisco’s Earth Day celebration. “The environment has always been very important to me,” says Barber Lounge owner Greg Griffin. “When I opened my salon I kept the environment and our carbon footprint in mind. We use Aveda products and they have a “cradle to cradle” mission statement meaning all their products are sustainable and safe for the environment from the bottle to the drain. It’s becoming increasingly more important for business’s to be mindful of how they impact the world we live in.”
Eco Author | 12:53 pm | May 20, 2009 | Restaurant | Add a comment
Our Restaurant, El Raigon Argentine Asado, serves 100% grass fed, free range beef imported from Uruguay. This beef is good for people, good for the animals and good for the environment. Because grass-fed beef does not rely on fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, and diesel (used in the planting, harvesting, processing and transportation of grains), grass fed beef is very low impact, with a low carbon footprint. In the place of fossil fuels, grass-fed beef relies on solar power, rainfall, and photosynthesis.
While much of our beef is shipped from Uruguay, our internal audits suggest that the amount of fuel (in the form of marine diesel) used to transport chilled containers is negligible when compared to the amount of fuel required to fatten the average U.S. feedlot steer. We estimate our fossil fuel consumption per pound of beef produced at somewhere between 1% and 10% of the U.S. commodity feedlot steer equivalent. In many ways, we help with land preservation. Our cattle live in harmony with nature and the fields are full of wild animals and birds. While raising cattle is not perfect nature, it far exceeds the alternative for most ranchers. If you have ever seen pastures converted to soy or mono-crops, you know. Mono-crop agriculture turns a pastoral setting into an area devoid of life other than the crop it’s producing.
The most economic use of land on per acre income is to produce soy or corn and put the cattle into feedlots, but our efforts give the farmers incentives to keep native grasslands. We feel that by preserving a demand for grassland, we are preventing industrial agriculture and all the negatives that go with it.
Animal welfare is critical to the beef we serve because it makes for a healthier and better-tasting steak; it also is the right way to treat animals. Free-ranging, grass-eating is the tradition in Argentina and Uruguay so the practices are inherent in the culture and tradition. It’s a simpler way to raise cattle for the very same reasons it’s better for them. Free range, grass fed cattle is beef the way nature intented, not unlike wild game.
Grass-fed beef has about half the fat and cholesterol of grain-fed beef. Additionally, the fat found in grass-fed beef is 41% mono unsaturated (like olive oil), so it’s good for you.
Grass-fed beef is packed with omega 3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, which are very beneficial to our health. It’s also higher in vitamins A and E. Corn-fed beef, on the other hand, was invented in the 1950s for convenience, not because it was healthier, better tasting, or more environmentally friendly. It is cheaper to produce and allows animals to be fattened in places where natural conditions don’t otherwise allow it.
For more info go to www.elraigon.com
Eco Author | 5:49 pm | May 13, 2009 | Transportation | Add a comment
Southwest is proud do our part to support the environment—on Earth Day and everyday. Through our current Companywide Share the Spirit initiative, Project: SAVE, Employees have already made their communities cleaner, greener, and more vibrant through litter collection projects, tree planting, graffiti wipeouts, and community gardening initiatives. And with Southwest’s recycling efforts, during the last five months of 2008, we recycled 217.83 metric tons of paper, cardboard, plastic, and aluminum which equates to saving 3,377 mature trees or 779 cubic yards of landfill space. In fact, Southwest was recently recognized as a 2009 Global Green 100 Honoree by the Uptime Institute.
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