Green Restaurant Certification

The project is a university student services center with a dining hall component that is also open to the public (pay at the door for "all you care to eat"). The lower floors of the building are dining-related, the upper floors are offices. The university has applied for Green Restaurant Certification via the Green Restaurant Association (GRA), and expects to achieve Gold level certification.

There is a lot of overlap in the requirements of the GRA and LEED. The GRA is a more prescritive approach, but also covers process equipment (e.g., energy star refrigeration and dishwashers), food (e.g., local and sustainable), materials (e.g., reusable cutlery), waste reduction (e.g., composting), and activities (e.g., donations of leftover food to food banks) that LEED does not. We plan to highlight these areas.

Follow-up: Our project did end up earning an ID point for Green Restaurant Association certification. We were asked to provide metrics to show tangible improvements over a baseline, and for categories that were not already covered by LEED.

Because the building was so new, we did not have a lot of building-specific metrics, but we did have numbers from other GRA-certified dining halls on campus. We also used numbers available on line from studies at other universities, etc., showing things like reduction in food waste from trayless dining, decreased carbon footprint from local food sourcing, etc. The LEED Reviewer seemed to find this approach acceptable.