Making Sustainability Work For You
By Melissa Markert
There are many admirable reasons to take a sustainable approach to cocktails and reducing waste in bars. However, we often overlook an important reason that impacts bars immediately and directly - the financial incentives.
The fact of the matter is, we are destroying the planet. While this seems like a great incentive for all of us to do better in our bars, it can sometimes be hard to convince a skeptical owner, or even yourself, that implementing sustainable measures can be viable from a financial perspective as opposed to simply being an idealistic pursuit.
When quantifying profitability, businesses generally concern themselves with “the bottom line”, or the last line on a company’s income statement. The bottom line quantifies a company’s net income after all expenses have been deducted from revenues. Basically, it tells you how much money you made after accounting for what you’ve spent. This bottom line number is what companies typically look at when determining their future behaviors. However, there are other considerations we can and should be taking into account. If we look at traditional profits and losses alone we cannot account for the full cost of doing business. Instead, we can utilise The Triple Bottom Line, an accounting framework that takes into account people and the planet alongside profitability, to see the larger picture.
The Triple Bottom Line
People: Considers how socially responsible an organization has been throughout its operations, accounting for things like fair wages and safe working conditions.
Planet: Considers a business’s environmental impacts.
Profit: Measures dollars in vs. dollars out in a given period of time.
The traditional bottom line does not take into account when a company uses a ton of chemical fertilizer and damages the soil for future uses. It does not consider how cheap disposable straws and to-go containers are putting a strain on municipal waste management. These things directly affect a business and it’s profitability in the long term. It is advantageous to think of people, planet and profit in tandem, because making improvements in one area will almost always have a positive impact on the others.
Let’s first consider people. Happy employees help businesses thrive. Sustainability is defined as, “the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level.” If your employees are being run into the ground, are underpaid or generally feel underappreciated, you are not going to be able to maintain a standard of service and quality, or keep up a business whose employees are producing sales greater than the cost of constantly replacing them. Employee turnover is expensive. According to The Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell University, it costs thousands of dollars per employee, with “the damage to productivity caused by the inexperience of new employees [being] the greatest contributor to the overall costs of turnover.”
Take the long view. Investing in your staff now will save you money down the line. Invest in education, provide experiential opportunities, leave room for creativity and listening and concern yourself with your staff’s health and wellness. As you gain a reputation for being a great place to work, you will attract and retain staff that are excited to work with you. Happy employees are more inspired and productive, translating to positive effects to your bottom line.
Now let’s consider the planet. The negative effects of our wasteful behaviors on the environment are substantial business risks, and the impact our bars have on the environment should be on the forefront of all of our minds. The best thing we can do, by and large, is to not make waste in the first place. Reduce, is the first part of the reduce, reuse, recycle system, but is often time not the first thing we look at. Bars are leaving money on the table when they do not have a close eye on their waste streams.
Start with a waste audit. Identify what your bar is wasting, how much of it you are wasting, and what that translates to in dollars. If you do not know what you are wasting, you cannot know what to change. To help bars get started, former head bartender at BlackTail NYC, William Pasternak, created
www.barwaste.com, a digital spreadsheet and calculator that is free to download and use as a tool for conducting an audit. “We wanted to find out what we threw away and what it was costing us, so we effectively costed everything like we cost a spirit. For things like juices, we applied that cost per ounce of juice to the amount of juice that we wasted, daily, weekly, etc. After collecting a few months of data we realised if we extrapolated those numbers out, we were potentially throwing away tens of thousands of dollars a year if we didn’t make a change.”
Consider the entire lifecycle of an object. Take into consideration all the inputs and outputs, all of the resources used and pollutants emitted to get that thing to your bar, from resource extraction through manufacturing, refrigeration, to distribution, storage, packaging — through an items use and then to its disposal. All of those inputs and outputs go to waste when you over order produce, or dump juice down the drain, or fly through bev naps over the course of a night, and there are costs inherent in every single step of a lifecycle. Figure out how to reuse materials instead of throwing them away and keep track of how many bags of trash you produce.
Do not mistake recycling as a replacement for reducing! After all, recycling is the last option in the reduce, reuse, recycle system. Recycling is a business. Materials are collected, sorted, squished into giant bales then resold to a buyer who cleans and processes them back down into their raw materials, and then sells those raw materials. Collected recyclables need to be in reasonably good shape to do anything with. If they are not, they either cannot be processed or the cost to recycle them would outweigh their market value. Many things people think are recyclable are not. Wet, balled up bev naps mingling with little bits of broken glass in a bin, for example, are going to end up in the trash. Paper needs to be clean to process it and glass has the highest market value in large pieces. Moreover, many cities no longer recycle because it has stopped being economically viable. Educate yourself on how to use your local waste management systems properly, cost effectively and avoid fines. In order to reap the environmental and economic benefits of recycling, we have to do it properly, and we need to create less of it.
Invest in durable and reusable products. This is a critical step in reducing your waste stream. When considering the lifetime cost of an item, take that upfront cost and divide it by how many times you are going to use it. The cost of these products decrease with every use, so while a metal straw or reusable coaster may have an unfriendly price tag in the short term, you stand to save in the long run by not having to replace them. Show your bar owners and investors what you can save them today with your waste audit, as a revenue stream to fund these upfront costs and cost out what they can stand to save in the future if they make the initial investment today.
Your brand’s reputation benefits when you take action to reduce your environmental impact. Consumers feel good when they buy products and services from companies that care about their communities and the world at large. Consumers are more likely to be loyal to your brand if your values align with their personal ones, according to a 2015 Nielson poll of 30,000 consumers across 60 countries. 66% of these global consumers and a full 73% of millennials (Nielsen defines Millennials as those born from 1977 to 1995) said they were willing to pay more for sustainable goods.
Alcohol is agriculture; and as people who serve the fruits of the earth everyday, bartenders need to consider their responsibility in preserving resources. But this consideration does not have to be at the expense of your bottom line. Your commitment to sustainable practices will keep the momentum of the movement heading forward, and help to convince more consumer markets that they should be supporting sustainability with their dollars. When you consider people and the planet, as an asset to profitability, you can run a better business.