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 Clean Air-Cool Planet has been helping organizations measure their carbon footprints since 2001. Now CA-CP takes its focus on scientific rigor, transparency and comprehensiveness to another aspect of sustainability within organizations: the impact of institutional dining services.
Our new initiative, CHarting Emissions from Food
Services, is developing a tool for release in early 2010 that quantifies the carbon impact of food production, processing, distribution, preparation and disposal. The goal is to create a tool like the Campus Carbon Calculator™-- one that is flexible enough to be used by any campus-based organization (e.g. schools, hospitals, corporate campuses, museums or camps, or municipal campuses), simple enough for someone that does not have a degree in industrial ecology, and accurate and relevant enough to truly inform better decision-making by dining service operators and their patrons.
The CHEFS program will be especially meaningful in that it is the first carbon footprint tool to reflect growing methods and supply chain models in the U.S. and Canada. Most existing programs use European data.
A prototype of the CHEFS tool is being piloted on 13 campuses, including Arizona State University, Boston University, Grand Valley State University, Furman University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, The Evergreen State College, the University of California at Davis, University of Florida, the University of New Hampshire, Vassar College, Wesley College and Yale University.
 Several of these campuses were instrumental in the original conceptualization of CHEFS, including Johns Hopkins University, whose Center for a Livable Future conducted the foundational research upon which the program is based, and Furman University, whose sustainability team encouraged CA-CP to create this resource.
 Download the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future Report
Yale University, another pilot school, hosted two CA-CP Climate Fellows this summer engaged in research and outreach related to this project, and experts from across the university have consulted with CA-CP on how to make the tool as accurate and user-friendly as possible.
ARAMARK, a leading provider of college and university dining services, is supporting the development of the tool with active research and facilitation for its participating pilot campuses, and is the project’s Founding Sponsor. Ten of the 13 pilot campuses are Aramark clients, and the company is facilitating data collection for those campuses. The close partnership with ARAMARK will help ensure that the tool has been thoroughly tested and is as relevant and user-friendly as possible to dining service operations on an institutional scale.
 The CHEFS tool will work in tandem with CA-CP’s current Campus Carbon Calculator™ which tracks direct campus emissions, and is generally regarded as the “tool of record” for most of the 650 signatories to the American Colleges and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), a voluntary agreement to move toward campus climate neutrality.
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