This subject arrives in restaurants as a poster: no straws, a recycling bin, a sentence on the menu about caring for the planet. Meanwhile the walk-in runs with a torn seal, the pre-rinse spray is a garden hose and four hundred takeaway orders leave every month carrying six pieces of packaging each. This course is about the second list, because that is where a restaurant's consumption actually is — and because almost none of it is visible to the guest, which is exactly why nobody works on it.
📏 Units, not intentions
The single rule that makes this subject useful instead of decorative: measure everything here in physical units. Kilowatt-hours, cubic metres of water, pieces of packaging, kilos. Not in money, and definitely not in adjectives.
Money is the cost control course's unit, and it distorts this conversation in both directions. Energy prices move for reasons that have nothing to do with you, so a bill that goes down does not mean consumption did; and a saving that looks small in pesos can be a large physical change that keeps paying for a decade. Adjectives are worse: "eco-friendly", "green" and "sustainable" mean nothing specific, which is why topic 5 spends its length on what you can honestly claim.
So every number in this course is a quantity. The example restaurant uses roughly 13,300 kilowatt-hours and 60 cubic metres of water a month, and sends out about 1,600 pieces of single-use packaging — around 19,200 a year. Those three figures are the whole subject. What they cost you belongs to the cost control course, which already read that bill; here we are deciding what to consume, not what to pay.
🔌 Where it actually is
Ask any restaurant team where the consumption is and you will hear straws, bags and lights. The real order looks like this, and it is remarkably stable across restaurants.
| What | Roughly its share of the electricity | Why it is that big |
| Cooking | About 30% | It runs hot for hours, often before anybody orders |
| Refrigeration | About 25% | It never switches off, and it fights every open door |
| Heating and cooling the room | About 20% | Doors, draughts and a kitchen pushing hot air around |
| Hot water and dishwashing | About 15% | Where the water and the electricity meet |
| Lighting | About 10% | The one everybody names first |
Lighting is last, and it is the one that gets the poster. That is the whole point of measuring: the visible things are small and the invisible ones are large, exactly as the cost control course found when it went looking for money. Nothing in this course asks you to stop serving what you serve — the changes that matter happen in a plant room, on a delivery counter and in the twenty minutes before service, where no guest ever looks.
🧭 What belongs here, and what belongs to the other two
This is the first of three courses on the subject, and they are split by where the material is at the time.
- This course is what the building consumes: energy, water, packaging, cleaning chemicals and single-use items.
- The sourcing course is where what you buy comes from: suppliers, distance, season, certifications and what is behind them.
- The waste course is what is left over: food that does not get sold, donation, composting and recycling done properly.
And two boundaries with courses you have already read. The cost control course owns the money: it read the energy bill as a line of your statement and counted waste as pesos in a log, and it is the right place for the question "what does this save". The marketing courses own telling people — but the warning about overclaiming lives here, in topic 5, because it is a reputation risk rather than a communication technique, and it is the part of this subject that most often blows up in a restaurant's face.
🎯 What a small restaurant can actually do
The last thing worth setting straight is scale. A fifty-seat restaurant is not going to solve anything global, and pretending otherwise is why this subject gets treated as theatre. What it can do is specific, unglamorous and worth doing on its own terms.
It can stop running equipment that nobody is using. It can stop water going down a drain at full pressure for no reason. It can send out fewer objects that get used for eleven minutes and thrown away. It can buy cleaning products in a form that does not ship water around the country. And it can be honest about all of it, which — as the topic on claims argues — is worth more with guests than any of the individual changes.
Those are the four topics that follow, in the order of how much they move: energy and water first because they are the biggest, packaging next because it is the most visible and the most controllable, chemicals and single-use last because they are small individually and add up to a surprising box at the end of a shift. Then how to talk about it, and how to make it survive past the first month.