“The Riverside Café at EBSCO Publishing took many steps to become a more sustainable, environmentally friendly corporate restaurant.” 

IPSWICH, Mass. —April 5, 2012 —EBSCO Publishing(EBSCO) has taken another step to reduce its carbon footprint, this time focusing on making the company’s private café more eco-friendly. EBSCO’s Riverside Café has been certified as a Green Restaurant by the Green Restaurant Association(GRA).

The Green Restaurant Association provides guidelines and helps restaurants—whether corporate dining facilities or commercial entities—to become more sustainable. The GRA evaluates restaurants on seven different categories: water efficiency, waste reduction and recycling, sustainable furnishings and building materials, sustainable food, energy, disposables, and chemical and pollution reduction. EBSCO’s Riverside Café earned a three-star grade. Only two restaurants in the country have earned four-stars.

GRA Chief Executive Officer Michael Oshman says more and more corporate restaurants are earning green certification. “The Riverside Café at EBSCO Publishing took many steps to become a more sustainable, environmentally friendly corporate restaurant.” The Riverside Café is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day to serve the nearly 900 employees at EBSCO’s Ipswich headquarters.

The café has taken some significant steps in becoming more environmentally friendly. It began by recycling plastic, glass, and aluminum in the kitchen and then began to compost all kitchen organic waste with a local composting company. The café also eliminated all disposable cups and replaced them with reusable mugs made from corn plastic. The Riverside Café staff then turned their attention to their vendors and suppliers, switching to local suppliers whenever possible and purchasing items such as napkins, plates, and takeout containers made from 100% post-consumer paper materials. The Riverside Café even has a vendor that is powered by wind turbines and EBSCO installed a solar water heater for the café’s kitchen.

Riverside Café Manager Cheryl Montale says all of the changes undertaken at the employee café came with the full support of EBSCO Publishing’s President Tim Collins. “Tim has always given us the mission and challenge of becoming more green,” The Green Restaurant certification is the latest in a long line of green initiatives for EBSCO which has focused on reducing its environmental footprint for more than a decade. 

EBSCO has installed two electric vehicle charging stations to encourage employees to purchase plug–in electric hybrids. The company has two 192-panel solar arrays designed to offset 20% to 25% of the energy needs of two of the company’s four downtown Ipswich buildings. EBSCO also provides hybrid vehicles as company cars and offers commuter rail reimbursements to employees who use public transportation. In keeping with EBSCO’s role as an information provider, the company also created a free database called GreenFILE^™which provides information about the impact humans have on the environment (www.greeninfoonline.com). EBSCO also blogs about sustainability at: http://ebscosustainability.com/. More information about EBSCO’s green initiatives can be seen in the “Why Go Green” video available at http://tiny.cc/EBSCOWhyGoGreenor on EBSCO’s website at www.ebscohost.com/green.

About EBSCO Publishing

EBSCOPublishingis the producer of EBSCOhost^®, the world’s premier for-fee online research service, including full-text databases, subject indexes, point-of-care medical reference, historical digital archives, and eBooks. The company provides more than 350 databases and nearly 300,000 eBooks. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals and magazines from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). EBSCO is also the provider of EBSCODiscovery Service^™(EDS), which provides each institution with a fast, single search box for its entire collection, offering deeper indexing and more full-text searching of journals and magazines than any other discovery service (www.ebscohost.com/discovery). For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com.  EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.

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For more information, please contact:

Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Director
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com