With more than 20 locations across the U.S., Xanterra Parks and Resorts serves people visiting Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Napa Valley and a number of national and state parks.

In line with its connection to nature, Xanterra has been taking steps to lower its environmental impacts with energy efficiency measures, waste reduction and choosing local and sustainable foods.

Greener World Media contributor Sarah Fister Gale spoke with Chris Lane from Xanterra about how to green up dining facilities, the importance of environmental management systems, how to bring down your energy needs and what it takes to get your suppliers to cut their waste.

Sarah Fister Gale: Chris Lane, tell me, what is your title at Xanterra?

Chris Lane: I'm the vice president of environmental affairs for Xanterra Parks and Resorts, and I oversee all environmental affairs as well as some health and safety issues at all the national parks, state parks and private resorts that Xanterra owns and/or operates across the country, which is in about 26 locations across the country.

SFG: Excellent. Well as I said this article is looking at dining facilities in particular, and many of our readers are gonna be looking at this from a business perspective. So if they have dining halls in their corporate facilities or catering facilities, I guess, but I know that you guys have been very progressive with taking a sustainable and green approach to the way you run your operation. Can we start by talking just a little bit about what some of the green or sustainable efforts you've made in the dining facilities in particular?

CL: Well I can answer that internally and I'll call it externally because there are a lot of things such as our environmental managers that are certified to the ISO 14001 international EMS (environmental management system) standard that inform what we do inside our restaurants, and as well as sustainable design of buildings, we've got an environmental building guideline that also informs what we do inside our restaurants. So there's some things that are external such as the EMS, the sustainable building guidelines, as well as our eco-metrics, which is what we call our environmental performance metrics tracking system that also relates.

So these are external issues and I imagine you want to talk more about internal. These are external issues that without these things in my opinion you wouldn't be getting things done systematically throughout a company and you wouldn't be institutionalizing programs as well as if we just say, “Here are five things we do inside restaurants.”

SFG: Right. I would like to talk about both of them, both the design of the facilities and the equipment as well as your operation.

CL: Yeah. Those are tracking systems and support systems and management systems that in my opinion you kind of have to have to make things happen within a restaurant at least on a large company scale such as ourselves.

SFG: Okay. Let's talk about those external features first.

CL: Well I mean the EMS, environmental management system, is what defines specifically at every operation what our aspects and impacts are and it just very simply says here are all of the things we do: lodging, restaurants, retail, transportation systems, and here are all the impacts associated with all those systems. So restaurant will be one of those and within restaurant you've got energy, you've got waste, you've got consumption of water, and then you've got food related issues, and that can be internal as well as external as you know. If you purchase organic sustainable food products you're impacting beneficially external to the restaurant itself.

Then we break down through our EMS every one of those categories. Let's just take the restaurant for example: energy, water, waste, food issues, and there are others as well, toxics as it relates to cleaning, food safety and human health and safety. Just taking a few of them, we break each one of those down and then analyze what can be done on an annual basis to affect change inside a restaurant setting.

You have EMS ties to everything, and of course that EMS gets verified through a third party. We conduct internal audits of our EMS to make sure it's working and then we have a third party auditor identify whether the system is working as well for continual improvement that's compliant with the law as well.

Now tied to that inside our EMS is our Marine Stewardship Council chain of custody certification. Again another third party comes into our operation, looks at our restaurant, and follows a complete chain of custody protocol for - and this is something we do as well, we internally audit ourselves to make sure we're serving sustainable foods. Now the one we focus on is salmon. That's the one that's MSC certified as wild, sustainable and healthy, and that has an internal chain of custody protocol as well as a third party, and it's a lot of work just to make sure you serve sustainable salmon, but we're willing to go through it because we think it makes a difference.

We're also going down that road of adding more and more species that are sustainable. Our fish policy for instance banned four fish species that are pretty slam dunk in my opinion. You don't want to be serving shark, bluefin tuna, Atlantic swordfish and species like that, but we're expanding them on that as well, banning certain species, and then we're certifying certain species of food we're serving, and then we're just also jumping into sustainable cuisine, our sustainable cuisine program.

Also just promoting what we're calling sustainable food, sustainable cuisine, and we define it fairly loosely on purpose. It can be local and we've drawn a line at 300 miles. Three hundred miles can be local in any direction. It can be third-party certified as environmentally preferable for whatever reason. So that opens up a few doors there. It can be certified organic but it also might be certified as hormone, antibiotic free. So any kind of certification, and this is a big one. 

Now this takes analysis internally. Is it beneficial to the species or to the environment in either survivability of the species? So salmon for instance is a sustainable caught species every year; wild Alaskan salmon is. Farmed shrimp is also sustainable, but then are there polluting impacts relative to it such as farmed salmon, which has negative impacts relative to the pollution associated with farming those animals. So shrimp is farmed on land, salmon is farmed in the ocean, we might go with the shrimp, we might not go with farmed salmon.

SFG: Let's back up for a minute and start with the facility itself. When you're building an operation, and I know it goes well beyond the restaurants, but what approach do you take to making the restaurant itself green and designing it in a way that it's gonna reduce the impact of the operation once you're up and running?

CL: Okay. Let me just clarify that the majority of the cases with Xanterra, we're coming into an existing restaurant that is either antiquated or old or just needing improvement. The minority of the cases would be where we build a restaurant from scratch. Now we have built several restaurants from scratch and what we've done since I've been on board is we've got our sustainable building guidelines. It's a process document that says if we're gonna build something, how are we gonna build it and who are we gonna get to build it and what are the things we're gonna consider when we build it.

If you're familiar with sustainable design the hardest part of it is the herding cat portion of it where you've got 20 different entities, architects, engineers, electrical, plumbers, carpet installers, roofers, getting them all to agree on what we're doing and then document it is the hard part. So this document sets a process for moving forward. It does not necessarily require every restaurant be LEED certified. It does not necessarily require that every restaurant be X, Y, Z sustainable. 

Though it doesn't set the standard, it says you must pursue sustainability, and whatever comes out at the other end of the pipe is what we'll be happy with if we go through this right, this process, the design, hiring a green architect, hiring a green mechanical engineer and a green electrical. Some of these people we've discovered if you get three or four of the top guys, a contractor and maybe three of the subs, as ultra green, and they understand sustainability, everything falls into place from there on.

We've got the LEED certified buildings, we've got the Annie Creek Restaurant and retail shop at Crater Lake, which is a LEED Silver certified building, and I won't bore you with all the features that we did, or I can if you want, features that we did do make it green, and then there's other cases such as Zion National Park at Zion Lodge where we've got the building that's 50 years old. It would be 100 but I think the building burned down in the 40's or 50's and they replaced it. Old building with old equipment and we took numerous steps to green that up. We said what appliances can we use that are the most efficient, on demand steam, getting rid of a fuel oil boiler and replacing it with propane. Fuel oil can spill, it's dirty burning, almost dirtier than propane.