Spring Break
Local restaurant aims to spread "green" efforts
Josh Kurtz
Issue date: 4/4/08 Section: News
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The event highlighted the "green" practices that the restaurant has instituted.
According to handouts distributed at the breakfast, Judy Wicks, the owner of the White Dog Cafe, uses a triple bottom line business technique that focuses on environmental friendliness and social impact, in addition to financial profit.
"A big new practice we're talking about today [at the breakfast] is our solar hot water system," Wicks said.
Wicks was "raised with an appreciation of nature" from a young age, she said.
Gradually, she became more environmentally conscious, though she did not immediately realize "how business effected environment."
Wicks said that her first environmental act occurred when she was 24 years old, when she helped prevent the street of row houses that the White Dog Café is a part of from being torn down and replaced with a mall. The mall would have required more energy to run than the row houses. Wicks said that row houses are especially energy efficient because only two sides of the buildings are exposed.
Since that time, Wicks said she has instituted a number of environmental policies at the White Dog Café.
Upon hearing the conditions in which some animals are kept, the restaurant stopped purchasing meats from providers with cruelly-treated animals. The restaurant now uses local, free-range farms as a provider.
Among other green practices, the restaurant became the first business in Pennsylvania to purchase 100 percent of its electricity from wind power.
Wicks said she was at first pleased with her restaurant's environmentally friendly niche, but later realized that there is "no such thing as one sustainable business." Rather, Wicks said, only a "sustainable system" can be effective in the long run.
Wicks said she realized she had to help other businesses add green practices in order to help create such a sustainable system. She now offers free consulting to other restaurants on how to become more environmentally friendly.
One of the goals of the Green Dog breakfast was "to further spread our green practices to other businesses and to households," according to Wicks.
In addition to an opening speech by Wicks, other speakers were scheduled to attend the event.
The scheduled speakers included Jurgen Balitzky, a solar power specialist and the person who installed the White Dog Cafe's solar hot water system, Cory Sutter, a contractor for BioNeighbors Sustainable Homes, which deals with energy friendly roofs, and Scott Kelly and Jeremy Avellino from the green architectural firm Re: Vision Architects, which helped with much of the restaurant's current environmentally friendly design, according to a White Dog Cafe news release.
Wicks has won numerous awards for her green practices, according to the release.
Her awards include the James Beard Foundation's Humanitarian of the Year and the Lifetime Acheivment Award at the Philadelphia Sustainability Awards. In addition, Wicks was named one of Oprah Magazine's Five Amazingly Gifted and Giving Food Professionals.
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