Menus That Talk discusses Green Initiative

Written by: Susan Perry

website: menusthattalk.com

Watching the Olympics last night I was reminded that when I started going to Hong Kong 15 years ago for my previous business, the skies were incredibly blue and it was such a beautiful city that I even gave serious thought to living there.

When I went just a year ago for my new business, I asked my manufacturing partner about what I thought was a strange bout of foggy weather. “Susan,” she said to me, “ we never see the sun anymore. What you’re seeing is smog and construction dust from China. And it’s always here.” And in the fifteen days after that conversation, I never saw the Sun.

I designed Menus That Talk without much thought about a green initiative. I did not think about how our product, which is inherently green, would help to reduce landfills and the contamination of our water supply. Mostly because I was busy and it took the shock of losing the sun to wake me up.

However, once awake I knew that I didn’t want to contribute further to the demise of Hong Kong. In addition we also manufacture in the heartland of America. (Beautiful Pittsburg Kansas). And so when we started manufacturing our product in mainland China I was determined that we would be as green and as pollution-free as possible. It has been a slow, hard battle. And I have made many mistakes.

My goal with this blog is to stimulate thinking of what you could be doing within your companies.

In our case: There are more than 1 million restaurants in the US alone and most change their menu at least once a year. The old menus – many of which are laminated wind up in the landfills. Petroleum-based inks leach VOCs—which cause cancer and birth defects—into the soil when printed papers end up in landfills. These toxins can also be released into the air as fresh inks dry. The average 200-seat restaurant prints about 75-100 new menus every year. That means, conservatively, about 50 million menus are dumped into our landfills every year across the country. Many of them are laminated.

But what good is producing a green product if you are polluting the environment to manufacture it? We are using recycled plastic to manufacture our units. (We hope. Certification in China is sketchy.) The units have been designed with energy-efficient and rechargeable batteries that we also recycle. The whole unit only uses five volts of energy and operates for six to eight hours per charge.
On top of this, we also use recycled materials for our packaging. Instead of Styrofoam inserts, we’re using cardboard. And we reuse packaging as much as possible.

To sum up, Menus That Talk has been build on a green foundation that we continue to work on. It is not a perfect process. What originally started as only a desire to help the communication process in Restaurants turned into so much more. All of us can recycle. All of us can think a little more green. I sincerely hope you are not as dense as I was. Let’s not lose our Sun