An on-slope café at Laax ski area in Switzerland has created a 'climate menu' for its customers.
Caffé NoName, situated above the world's largest halfpipe, serves up sustainable dishes for its guests but describes the ecological footprint of each product determined by its origin.
Caffé NoName aims to offer regional products involving short transportation wherever possible, ensuring an environmentally friendly approach and high-quality food and The Climate Menu details this.
The initiative is one of many across Laax which has a resort-wide policy called 'Greenstyle' with the objective becoming a 'self-sufficient' resort in terms of its impact on the environment.
Laax is already 100% green-energy powered, winning the European solar prize in 2016 for its efforts and now planning to put a wind farm on the Vorab glacier.
"As recently as 20 years ago, we used to regularly have snowboard summer camps on the Vorab Glacier in the middle of July,' Reto Fry (pictured below), sustainability manager at the Weisse Arena Gruppe recalls, but says that the vast decline of the glacier means this is no longer possible today.
Temperatures in the Alpine region have risen twice as much as the global average over the last 100 years.
"According to a projection by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the snow season is becoming one to two days shorter every two years. This development is already noticeable. While visitors could enjoy an early start to the season at the end of October some years ago, the first snow now often falls later. This is also the case in LAAX. The snow line has risen, with snow falling later. For a region renowned for winter sport tourism, the changing climate conditions are a real challenge," a statement from Laax reads.
Other Greenstyle initiatives already introduced include reducing waste and having an efficient recycling system; using sustainable building materials to protect natural resources; implementing wildlife, water and plant protection measures; support for fair trade products produced locally and in an environmentally friendly manner and using their Influence on industry, suppliers and partners to promote sustainability.
Laax say their goal now is to use exclusively sustainable resources in the near future and become what they describe as, "the world's first self-sufficient winter resort," and are now working with suppliers in the wider region to encourage this through their Greenstyle Foundation,
"I try to ensure a good life for my children and want them to be able to breathe clean air. I do everything in my power every day to make this possible," Fry concludes.
http://www.laax.com/en/greenstyle