Sustainability

At STREAT our number one concern is to deliver a top rate experience for our trainees, but we are also passionate about sustainability and low impact eating. We have an open and ongoing dialogue with staff members and industry specialists on cutting edge and common sense ways to reduce to reduce our carbon foot print and spread awareness about green solutions. To this end, recently we met with Andy Jones (sustainability practitioner and all-round nice guy) to discuss strategies and ideas for making STREAT products as ethically and environmentally friendly as possible.

Some of the issues we covered where: food miles, using seasonal ingredients, justice and Fair Trade issues, and using organic produce where ever possible. One of the things we learnt was sometimes you have to weigh what’s better between a fully organically grown tomato driven down from Queensland or an in-season but pesticide-covered tomato grown locally?  Another example Andy used was the plastic wrapped super market cucumbers can actually use less packaging to get from farm to you than the unwrapped cucumbers!

We decided one of the best ways we can make an impact is by educating ourselves and the public as best we can and spread awareness. For instance it’s one thing us having fully bio-degradable spoons, garbage bags and soup cups etc, but if somebody buys a meal from us then dumps the container in general waste with a plastic rubbish bag it kind of defeats the purpose. We can conclude from this that another step we can take is convincing surrounding councils and businesses to use bio-degradable rubbish bags and separate recyclables where possible.

As you can see this will have to be an ongoing and in-depth process to reduce our negative impact and raise the bar for our positive impact.