Sometimes one good thing leads to another. Take one of our green team members, Geremy Capone. Geremy’s day job is to teach healthy cooking to cancer patients and survivors at ELLICSR. OK, if he stopped there, it’s already wonderful, but we’ll add a level. His interest in healthy cooking led him to work with the UHN Real Food Garden, which, if you haven’t heard about it yet, is quite the seed – to – feed experience. UHN staff volunteer to sow, hoe and grow some delicious produce. That produce goes to Geremy to use in his cooking classes.  

Now all was lovely at ELLICSR, except for the mounds of carrot tops and onion skins going into the garbage. Geremy knew they could be rescued but also knew Housekeeping has limited spots for organic waste pick up, and sadly, he wasn’t one of them. What to do with all those peels and rinds on his mind? Through a few magic phone calls and emails by us at Energy & Environment and the lovely folks at Toronto General Housekeeping department, Geremy got his very own giant organics container which he regularly hoists to the loading dock. We’ll call that weight lifting a wellness benefit as well as an environmental one.   

Geremy’s been so keen about his green bin, he’s gotten a lot of his coworkers to use it too. So now it’s not just the cooking classes, it’s his colleagues left-over lunches going into the mix. Gotta love the group effect.

We’ve got lots of groups in on this great organic action, like the green team from eHealth, the eGreens. Among other green projects they’ve got on the go (TLC, changing batteries to rechargeable, tracking paper use and more), they’ve been working together to collect compost from their lunchroom since April 2010. They wanted to see how much organic waste they saved from landfill out of their leftover lunches, past-due pastries, and seen-better-days snacks that went in their green bin.

They set to weighing and measuring and making fancy spreadsheets to show some pretty fantastic news. In the almost 2 years they’ve been catching their compost, they’ve saved about 55 lbs/month, which is 1,300 lbs so far (590 kg). That’s the weight of an adult male Polar Bear!

Want to start something organic with your group? Give us a shout to get you going. And hopefully, one good green thing may lead to another.

Lisa