Next time you're in a restaurant, sit back over a cup of tea or coffee, and take a long look around. The chairs, tables, lights, food, thermostats, cups of water. Everything. See if you can spot all the things that could be more environmentally friendly.

Michael Oshman, founder, Green Restaurant Association.(Photo: Robin Lubbock)

Oshman bets you'll be there all night. Everything in a typical restaurant could be greener.

Oshman is founder of the Green Restaurant Association (GRA), a non-profit environmental consulting group that's trying to transform one of America's largest industries into a model of modern sustainability.

A tall order, because Americans love to eat out. There are almost one million restaurants coast to coast. Each one generating 50,000 pounds of waste, and using an average of 300,000 gallons of water annually. Americans consume 70 million restaurant meals a day. We spend more than $500 billion on prepared foods every year. "That's larger than many economies in the world," says Oshman. "If the United Nations were organized by industry, restaurants should be sitting side by side with other businesses negotiating the Kyoto Protocol."

The GRA helps food service business become what they call "certified green restaurants". The certification process begins with a top-to-bottom environmental assessment. The restaurant then commits to making four annual changes suggested by the GRA (e.g. low-flow spray valves to reduce water use, LED lighting to boost energy efficiency, composting to manage food waste), and voilà, it becomes a "certified green restaurant." The GRA charges an annual fee from $600 (per store for a chain) to $2200 (individual restaurants). So far 1000 restaurants in 23 states have gone green.

Oshman, 35, has been toiling away at his slow growing revolution for 17 years, back before the words "sustainability", "carbon footprint", or "inconvenient truth" fell so easily from American lips.

"People are feeling impacts on the environment," he says. "All of the sudden, having a good environment is good business! The two are inextricably tied."

Chef Michael Leviton (r.), in the kitchen at Lumiere. (Photo: Robin Lubbock)

GRA client and chef Michael Leviton agrees. "It's philosophically consistent," says the award winning owner of Lumière, a Newton, MA restaurant. "We're already local, organic and humane as possible in our food… and we're naturally trying to do the right thing by the environment and our customers, so it made sense."

However, Leviton was willing to take the enviro-retrofit only so far. Recycling program, fryer oil conversion to biodiesel, non-toxic cleaning chemicals, and post-consumer recycled kitchen paper towels? Yes, yes, yes and yes.

Fluorescent bulbs in the dining room? Absolutely not. "Especially in a restaurant whose name means light in French," the Lumière owner says. "People don't look great under fluorescents, so I'm not about to change that."

But Leviton does have big plans for composting, something Lumière's not yet doing. Food makes up half a typical restaurant's total waste. Leviton envisions using a biodiesel powered truck to ship kitchen scraps to a local farmer who converts it to compost to nurture high quality organic crops, and the bio-truck transports them back to Leviton's kitchen. It's a dreamy closed-loop of sustainability that's enough to warm Al Gore's solar paneled heart.

"I get that," says GRA founder Michael Oshman, "but you've got to take into account the overall impact of emissions from an extra truck on the road that may not have to be there."

Okay, so the calculus of sustainability is complicated. But some restaurant owners believe the benefit to their bottom line is clear.

Take the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, a chain with more than 200 stores nationwide. Tami Clark, Vice President for marketing, says, "There's a big appeal for environmental protection here." By "here" Clark means their home market of California. Between blended wheat-grass shots in Berkeley and carbon neutral Academy Awards shows in LA, Clark says the environment is "a big priority and I think it's important for our customers to know we care about it."

Clark expects their U.S. stores will be fully green certified by Earth Day, April 22, 2007. She also hopes it will grow their customer base. Even if it doesn't, going green is making the company money: a net savings of "three-quarters of a million dollars over five years," according to Clark.

So, if one chain goes green, will others follow? Are you going to get burgers boxed in potato-starch based polylactic acid bioplastic any time soon?

Probably not. Industry-wide, the sustainability concept is "in its very early stages," says Todd Mann, senior vice president at the National Restaurant Association in Washington. Eighty-five percent of restaurants are individually owned and operated, and those small businesses have bigger worries Mann says, such as: "Is all my staff going to show up for the shift, did the supplies come in, all those things are critical to surviving on a day to day basis."

Lumiere’s used fryer oil gets recycled into biofuel. (Photo: Robin Lubbock)

While the global brands have the purchasing power, supply chain organization, and cultural impact to transform the restaurant industry, the big chains haven't jumped on the green restaurant bandwagon, either. But if MacDonald's lit up the Golden Arches with LEDs, sent its fryer oil to a biofuel plant, and made money doing it, it'd be hard for Burger King, Wendy's and Jack-in-the-Box not to follow suit.

Even if they did, would billions of steroid-free burgers served on trays washed with non-toxic cleaners really make the world more sustainable? Very little in the green restaurant mantra asks people to put themselves on the fast-track to sustainability: Reduce consumption.

"In some ways, there are incompatibilities with a consumer society and sustainability," says James Goldstein, senior fellow at the Tellus Institute, a Boston environmental research group. He wholeheartedly supports the green restaurant concept, but says reaching a sustainable Shangri-La is going to require a "lifestyle change…The average American consumes roughly 3700 calories a day. That's way over the FDA's recommended calorie intake." Efficient restaurants only go so far: super-sized American consumers will still be using super-sized amounts of energy and generating super-sized volumes of waste.

Green Restaurant Association founder Michael Oshman doesn't disagree. But what's a smart young citizen to do? Oshman chooses to fight the green fight, one restaurant at a time. Saving the environment is "the most morally pressing issue of our generation," he says. "Even if we solved all our other social issues but we didn't deal with this one, we'd be a bunch of happy people all getting along but our house is burning down."