We have recently undergone an audit from ENVISION a not-for-profit organisation which helps businesses to look at their environmental impacts. With Envision we have set up an Environmental Management System, essentially a quality management system; we monitor the way we work, and then come up with ideas for reducing energy and water use. We then set targets for reductions, and measure this weekly.

Our success is dependant on involving all our staff, and we make sure that bi-monthly staff meetings ask for staff participation and commitment.
So far we have set a target for reducing our energy use, which is gas and electricity, by 5% in six months.

During our refurbishment in January 2007, we exchanged our bottle and wine fridges for energy efficient models, we exchanged our plate and glass washers for water efficient models, and we received consultation from South West Water on what equipment to use for water efficient toilets. We installed storage heaters which only use electricity for 15 minutes out of every hour to heat the restaurant. In the kitchen we contracted a company called Energy Save to install a Heat Exchange unit which sucks in the hot air created in the kitchen, using it to heat our water, and then blows out the by-product which is cold air, to cool our hard working kitchen staff. This means that we are using about a third of the gas that we needed to heat water in the conventional boiler before the refurbishment. Lastly, we used local trades people to carry out the work, and the wood used to make the bar is Forestry Commission certified teak, reclaimed from old Indonesian houses.
We have contacted all our suppliers to ask for their commitment to work together to reduce our impacts.

We are researching a waste minimisation scheme to reduce the waste we send to land fill, and we are also setting up a working group through the Totnes Chamber of Commerce to ask the local council to start recycling trade waste.
Other aspects include initiatives to join the local Slow Food movement, involvement in the Transition Town Totnes local food directory; an exercise which asks local businesses to list everything they source within the locality.
Other ideas in the pipeline include listing food miles for some of our dishes. With one other business in Totnes, we will be having an Oil Vulnerability Audit, the first of its kind, which looks at how we depend on oil for the success of our business, and ways we can diversify to lessen the dependency. We'll also be taking part in a project called Responsible Fish Restaurants, which hopefully speaks for itself.

We hope that before the end of 2007 we will be ready for an audit and grading of gold, silver or gold from the Green Tourism Business Award.