CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. — A Charlottetown restaurant has gone green-friendly in hopes that product suppliers will one day do the same.
Rob Warren, the food and beverage manager at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, manages the facility’s in-house catering and restaurant, Mavor’s.
Mavor's now uses compostable materials for its take-out products.
“(It) was something we’ve been very much looking forward to embracing for a couple of years," Warren said.
Warren played a big role in the transition. Before working at the Confederation Centre, he was a wildlife biologist in Ontario for about 20 years.
“So, I’ve always been interested in environmentally-friendly products and making sure what we do here is environmentally friendly.”
When Mavor’s launched its take-out menu in May, the centre decided to take the jump and go green. Mavor’s 2Go uses packaging for its take-out products made of compostable materials like paper, sugarcane, and corn starch.
Now, the initiative is trickling throughout the rest of the facility, Warren said.
“All of our catering, all of our restaurant’s business. Everything that we’re starting to do is moving away from plastics.”
The green restructure is not without its challenges. How Mavor’s collects and sorts garbage had to be reassessed, and sourcing environmentally friendly products on P.E.I. wasn’t an option.
“It changes the way we do a lot of things,” Warren said. “It’s a very big step.”
While it’s more expensive to use compostable materials, Warren sees more and more customers attracted to buying from green-friendly businesses.
“The cheapest thing isn’t always the best thing for us.”
Investing in it now will make monetary sense down the road, he said.
“People don’t want to destroy the planet while they have lunch.”
Warren hopes the move will pressure product suppliers to start packaging responsibly and stop using plastic for the products they ship out. If restaurants and businesses take the lead on going green, suppliers and the province will see there’s a demand for sustainability, he said, calling it a trickle-up affect.
“We still have to make the effort, and that’s the kind of pressure that’ll make that happen eventually,” he said. “We have to create the demand.”
