By Erin Wiltgen
chh@heraldsun.com; 419-6654
CHAPEL HILL -- Chapel Hill has decided to take a proactive look at how to improve storm water management.
The UNC Institute for the Environment (UNC-IE) in conjunction with the town's Stormwater Management Division -- supported by a grant from the Wallace Genetic Foundation -- held a series of focus groups with restaurant employees to gather information on the existing knowledge of storm water pollution.
Four focus groups of eight to 12 participants spanned from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, two of which consisted of owners, managers and executive chefs while the other two included cooks, dishwashers and servers.
"The goal of our partnership is to find creative and effective ways to educate businesses in Chapel Hill and Carrboro on how to reduce their storm water impacts," said Kathleen Gray, UNC-IE's associate director for outreach and public service.
Restaurants represent the first of three targeted groups.
An advisory committee of storm water, pollution prevention and environmental education professionals as well as local business representatives met to identify three industries to make up UNC-IE's target commercial sector. The committee decided on the restaurant, painting and concrete contractor industries. The focus groups for the latter two industries will start in January or February.
In the focus groups, UNC-IE staff led an open discussion about business and environment, hoping to get a general idea about how restaurants view their impact on the environment.
"The point of the focus group is not to educate your participants, but to see what they know," Gray said. "We just learn about how their restaurants address environment, health and safety issues and how do they train their employees in those issues."
So Gray and her staff asked leading questions about focus group participants' history in the food service industry, how aware they are about a restaurant's impact on water quality and what restaurants can or should do to address said impact.
"The focus groups are basically just to bring people who are working in the industries -- whether it's restaurants, concrete groups or painters -- to find out what they know or don't know as far as water quality and waters systems," said Wendy Smith, environmental education coordinator with the Stormwater Management Division. "In an education outreach and training program, we don't want to conflict with productivity. We want to actually enhance productivity."
Throughout the process, no restaurant names are used, and the Stormwater Management Division has remained aloof of the focus group proceedings.
"We want to give them anonymity and want them to feel very safe in saying anything they want," Smith said. "The town has stepped back to allow that to happen."
But the Stormwater Management Division dives back into the picture when the analysis starts. The input from the focus groups will guide the formation of education materials, indicating what medium would work best -- video or brochure, for example -- and what messages generate the best responses from restaurant employees.
"We'll use the information to develop some pilot education materials, which will go back to restaurants that have agreed to work with us," Gray said.
And in a country where storm water runoff from residential, commercial and industrial areas causes 21 percent of impaired lakes and 45 percent of impaired estuaries, according to the U.S. Environmental Practice Agency, such educational material is crucial, Gray said.
"There's plenty of general educational materials and even regulatory guidance about stormwater," she said. "But there aren't many good hands-on materials that businesses, particularly the commercial sector, can pick up and run with."
While other states, such as California, have made great headway on managing water pollution from the commercial sector, North Carolina has lagged behind, Smith said.
"This is a niche that I thought really needed fulfilling," she said. "This is a need across the board. Stormwater managers and public health officials really have very few materials to use in an educational outreach proactive training program."
Raising awareness becomes crucial as pollutants -- from car oil to restaurant grease to loose dirt lying around construction sites -- collect unnoticed, especially in the Triangle where development has occurred so rapidly, Gray said.
"There are all sorts of potential contaminates out on the ground," she said. "And when it rains those all get washed directly into our streams, lakes, rivers. I think there's a disconnect for most people between seeing a drain and thinking that it ends up in a stream."
