BY MARC LALONDE

marc.lalonde@transcontinental.ca



A Ste. Anne de Bellevue restaurant and pub and McGill University teamed up to offer diners at an international environmental symposium at Macdonald Campus a green treat, of sorts, for lunch last Friday. Instead of the take-out dishes and cutlery going straight into the trash after the meal, they’ll eventually go back into the ground.

The compostable dishes and utensils on display for the cold lunch served at the ‘A Biorevolution in the Next 100 Years’ symposium held all day at Macdonald College were a result of two things; McGill’s desire to have the environmentally-themed symposium be a waste-free event and caterers Cunningham’s Pub’s desire to furnish what was a history-making event on the Macdonald Campus. The result was a clean, back-to-nature meal and zero waste.

“It’s a cool initiative,� said McGill University planning and communications manager Kathy MacLean. “We are a campus that exists in harmony with the environment, and we wanted to create a zero-waste event. Why create waste when you don’t need it?�

MacLean said embracing the environment is no longer the realm of granola-eating tree-hugger types as once thought.

“Instead of filling up landfills and garbage dumps, we’re putting things back into the earth. It’s about making (the environment) a priority. It’s largely driven by the youth, and a lot of us who aren’t that far removed from youth, and it’s a great move,� she said.

MacLean gave Cunningham’s credit for making McGill’s environmental vision a reality.

“They did a lot of the legwork. Take-out boxes usually create a lot of waste, but this created none at all,� she said.

The single drawback to the compostable dishes and containers is that they can only hold and manipulate cold food. Heat makes the compostable containers disintegrate in seconds.

Cunningham’s owner Bob McEwen said the university requested the feature, but it’s something the pub will begin to use on a regular basis, wherever possible.

“Obviously, it’s what people want. We had talked with the university about doing the symposium that way, and we were fine with it. They’re giving us the opportunity to do these events and so we got on the wagon with the compostable dishes,� he said, adding they would use the dishes in the pub as well, if that interests people.

“That’s our future and shows where we want to go in the future. There are certain things we’ll be able to do with them. We’ll sit down with the kitchen and figure out what we can do. You can’t really put 24 chicken wings in them,� McEwen said, adding that when his establishment caters the next few events it’s contracted for at Macdonald, it will try to repeat the

experience.

“It’s all about trying to figure out what we can recycle and compost and what we can’t. We’d like to do it with everything,� he said.

The symposium featured speakers on such topics as global warming, genome research and bio-fuel and attracted academics from all over the world.