Forum discussion

EBOM-2009 MRc5:Sustainable Purchasing—Food

Sustainable Food Calculations

Our project does not include any restaurants within the scope of the LEED project boundary, so we are looking to include all catering purchases made by each company, not individuals (our office tower has 3,500+ occupants). Everything has to go through security, so documenting (receipts) should not be a problem. My questions is, how do you identify whether a particular meal choice is fully sustainable or not when it's made up of multiple ingredients? Example: A pizza uses organic sauce, but the rest of the ingredients are conventional and the caterer may opt to not participate in tracking where each of their ingredients come from. Would you break the cost of that product apart or consider the entire meal meeting the sustainability criteria? When you compare this credit to other similar ones (most commonly found in NC (materials & resources tracking), they account for a percentage of the product to meet a particular standard. (I.e. 10% of PCR + 20% RRM in Carpet tile.)

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Thu, 11/03/2011 - 16:09

Hi Andy, that is a very good question. I have yet to see any guidance on that issue. I think your suggested approach of % of sustainable ingredients would be a valid approach - perhaps that is worth a CIR for your project. As documenting the % of ingredients that meet sustainability criteria will be very time consuming, I recommend performing some preliminary calculations in advance to see if you're likely to meet the 25% threshold. Good luck and let me know how it goes!

Fri, 11/04/2011 - 17:58

Thank you Natalie. I will keep you posted on the CIR response.

Wed, 02/13/2013 - 21:06

Andy-how did this work out? I would be interested to know how they responded to the idea of calculating part of a food item. Thanks!

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