Sustainable Restaurant Association aims to usher in era of green cuisine

An association aimed at improving the environmental performance of British eateries has launched this week, to help the UK's 30,000 restaurants realise that being green need not necessarily be a huge burden on their budgets.

The Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA) has been established to help the growing number of restaurants that want to improve their sustainable performance, providing them with best practice advice and a mechanism for highlighting their environmental credentials.

The SRA's managing director, Simon Heppner, said: "There is a wide range of pressures for restaurants to be more sustainable and we aim to show it doesn't have to be complicated or expensive and is instead a simple and achievable goal.

"Through responding to this challenge, restaurants can not only satisfy existing customers and gain new ones, they can also make positive changes for the environment and society and be properly rewarded for their efforts."

The association will also look to tackle the restaurant industry's poor reputation for environmental performance. According to the Environment Agency, restaurants in England and Wales throw away three million tonnes of food waste and 600,000 tonnes of glass every year, while using enough water to fill more than 104,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The association is the brainchild of Giles Gibbon, CEO and founder of corporate social responsibility consultancy Good Business; Mark Sainsbury, founder of Moro and The Zetter Hotel; and Henry Dimbleby, founder of Leon.

Several high-profile restaurants and chains have also become founder members, including Carluccio's, Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, Caffe Caldesi, Due South, the Seahorse Restaurant, and Feng Sushi.

To qualify for membership, restaurants must meet at least three criteria from a comprehensive list covering 14 broad sustainability and environmental areas outlined by the SRA. Once in the group, restaurants are entitled to display a " We're at the table" sticker.

The group said it wanted to help as many restaurants as possible and as a result had kept membership terms and conditions as "simple and flexible as possible". However, in order to ensure that the association continues to drive improvements across its membership, restaurants must meet three additional criteria every year if they want to renew their membership.

The criteria cover areas including ethical and sustainable food sourcing, environmentally positive farming, supply chain actions such as insisting that suppliers use less packaging and asking them about their own environmental, social and ethical policies and energy efficiency actions, and community engagement.