Earth Day is here. As a business owner I fully realize that we, I, have a much larger earthly footprint than most people. Not only is it responsible citizenry, but it is also an economic necessity to be "green". With all the political diatribe and misleading information out there it is really hard for someone like me to make those responsible decisions.

Too often we are faced with choices that sounds "green", but in every day practice just do not work. A couple of examples might be the lower water usage toilets that were mandated by law in the nineties. Ask any male that is my age how many times more he has to flush and do the math. Or how about reports that I have read that say it takes a gallon and half of gasoline to make one gallon of ethanol.

One of the choices that directly effects us in the restaurant industry, is the paper vs plastic argument. While biodegradability is an issue, everything that I have ever read has said it is cleaner and overall less harmful to the environment to produce plastic. Where are the truths? I know enough to know when I don't know enough. It would be really helpful to a business owner if we had a fair and honestsource that we could refer to in order to understand the pros and cons of the many environment effecting decisions we have to make. Unfortunately, I don't know of any.

One thing that we do, for both economic and environmental reasons, is to strictly monitor our utility usage. We input a few pieces of information each month, like number of days, average temperature, therms used, electricity used and the cost into a spread sheet. With this we can figure out if the fluctuations in our utility costs are because of rate changes or us being more efficient. We also do this with our water bill. Many times it has helped us to notice a malfunctioning piece of equipment, water leaks and other things that do and don't save energy.

Several years ago when we had to replace our roof. We did so with a "green" roof. Our "green" roof was actually a white vinyl one that would supposedly save 10 to 20 percent off of our air conditioning costs because of it reflectivity. A year after that we replaced two of our older air conditioners with more efficient ones. After the promises of great increases in efficiency we notice zero savings. ( See link below to our utility usage) Feel free to use this as a template for your home or business.

We are also diligent about our monthly cleaning of our refrigerator and air conditioning coils. This is probably the single most import thing you can do to save electricity.

Uptown's Utility Spreadsheet