Personal choices in support of sustainability

1. Consider all your purchases—in your profession and personal life

The en­vi­ron­men­tally re­spon­si­ble plate model de­picts en­vi­ron­men­tally sound raw ma­te­rial choices uti­liz­ing the tra­di­tional plate model.

Re­mem­ber to pay at­ten­tion to the fol­low­ing is­sues be­fore pur­chas­ing de­ci­sions:

• Is the prod­uct pro­duced nearby?
• Do you know the ori­gin of the prod­uct?
• Is the prod­uct made from re­new­able raw ma­te­ri­als?
• Are the veg­eta­bles and sea­sonal prod­ucts also taken into ac­count?
• Are there less pack­ag­ing ma­te­rial used?
• Is the prod­uct long last­ing, durable, multi-us­able, safe, easy to re­pair and main­tained or up­dated?
• Does the prod­uct use en­ergy-ef­fi­cient tech­nol­ogy?

2. Sort out the waste properly

When the waste sort­ing and the re­cy­cling works prop­erly, only a small amount of the waste ends up in the land­fill. This will save nat­u­ral re­sources, be­cause the waste can be reused as raw ma­te­ri­als and/or uti­lized as a source for en­ergy.

Do you re­mem­ber where you sort bones or plas­tic can­is­ters?

Pre-treatment of waste

• Rinse all the bev­er­age car­tons
• Rinse all the glass bot­tles, food cans and other con­tain­ers.
• Fold down all the pack­ages, be­fore dis­pos­ing them, al­low­ing more room for pack­ages.
• Veg­etable and an­i­mals fats and oils are pack­aged into empty con­tain­ers and placed into an ap­pro­pri­ate con­tainer at the waste room.
• Drain all the liq­uid sep­a­rately from the biowaste.
• Re­mem­ber to leave the caps on the re­turn­able bot­tles.

3. Sort bio-waste properly

The proper sort­ing and the re­duc­tion of the bio-waste in the kitchen pro­duces less global green­house gas, meth­ane. Prop­erly sorted bio-waste can be com­posted and used at the gar­dens and fields.

Ed­i­ble food waste: Food waste that was orig­i­nally ed­i­ble be­fore dis­pos­ing them. Will end up as waste.

Ined­i­ble food waste: The com­po­nents of food which had not been ini­tially meant for eat­ing, such as cer­tain peels of fruits and veg­eta­bles, bones and skin, cof­fee grounds.

Bio-waste is weighed daily at Restau­rant Perho as well as at the cafe­te­ria Herkku. The com­mon aim is to re­duce the amount of ed­i­ble food waste!

Com­post­ing is a nat­u­ral method of mi­cro-or­gan­isms (bac­te­ria, fungi and mush­rooms) to de­cay any or­ganic mat­ter in aer­o­bic con­di­tions. Car­bon diox­ide, wa­ter va­por and nu­tri­tional hu­mus is cre­ated dur­ing the com­post­ing, that can be used in hor­ti­cul­ture.

Did  you know…? Roughly one third of the food pro­duced in the world for hu­man con­sump­tion ev­ery year — ap­prox­i­mately 1.3 bil­lion tonnes — gets lost or wasted!! Did you know that ev­ery 20th gro­cery bag is thrown away into trash in Fin­land?

Fur­ther in­for­ma­tion can be found in an ar­ti­cle about food waste in a web­page by United Na­tions.

4. Save energy and water

Re­mem­ber to turn off the lights if you don’t need them. Turn off the ma­chines when you don’t use them (com­put­ers, oven, tele­vi­sion etc.) In­creased use of tech­nol­ogy has at the same time in­creased the use of en­ergy. Ef­fi­cient en­ergy use and the re­duc­tion of the en­ergy use are en­vi­ron­men­tally friendly acts.

WWF—Earth Hour: http://www.earth­hour.org/

5. Save water

Use wa­ter ef­fi­ciently and do not run wa­ter un­nec­es­sar­ily. Close the valves af­ter each use. By cal­cu­lat­ing your wa­ter foot­print, you can find out how much your life­style con­sumes the world’s wa­ter re­sources.

Many ev­ery­day prod­ucts con­tain so-called ’vir­tual wa­ter’.Vir­tual wa­ter could have been con­sumed in coun­tries where wa­ter is al­ready scarce. For ex­am­ple, a cup of cof­fee con­tains about 140 liters of vir­tual wa­ter; in ad­di­tion to the wa­ter used to make the cup of cof­fee.

Water footprints

• The green wa­ter foot­print: The green wa­ter foot­print refers to con­sump­tion of green wa­ter re­sources (rain­wa­ter stored in the soil as soil mois­ture) to pro­duce the goods and ser­vices.

• The blue wa­ter foot­print: The blue wa­ter foot­print refers to con­sump­tion of blue wa­ter re­sources (sur­face and ground­wa­ter) to pro­duce the goods and ser­vices.

• The grey wa­ter foot­print: The green wa­ter foot­print refers to pol­lu­tion and is de­fined as the vol­ume of fresh­wa­ter that is re­quired to as­sim­i­late the load of pol­lu­tants given nat­u­ral back­ground con­cen­tra­tions .

Fur­ther in­for­ma­tion:

http://www.wa­ter­foot­print.org

6. Pleasant environment for everyone

Ev­ery­one’s’ per­son­al­ity adds rich­ness to our com­mu­nity. We shall re­spect and value each mem­ber of our com­mu­nity; at school, at work, at a place of hobby—ev­ery­where. Ac­cord­ing to sus­tain­able prin­ci­ples, ev­ery­one has the right to equal well-be­ing.

Let’s take care of our sur­round­ings! When you bor­row and use any tools or equip­ment, re­mem­ber to re­turn them washed and cleaned back to their orig­i­nal stor­age place. Re­port multi-func­tion­ing of equip­ment or tools to your teacher or main­te­nance worker.

Perho Culi­nary, Tourism & Busi­ness Col­lege is com­pletely a smoke-free en­vi­ron­ment (1976/693 10§, 11§, 12§) Smok­ing and the use of chew­ing to­bacco is for­bid­den in­side the school build­ing as well as around the school yard. To­bacco prod­ucts are for­bid­den for any­one un­der 18-years old.