Populus Denver — home to two dining concepts, Pasque and Stellar Jay — is America’s first carbon-positive hotel. The hotel’s sustainability initiatives are driven by executive chef Ian Wortham and his culinary team, who go beyond the typical farm-to-table dining strategies to have more of an eco-friendly impact on the community around them.
The hotel opened last October, and was created with environmental impact in mind, with initiatives including a robust composting program and partnerships with regenerative farmers.
“So much of restaurants’ environmental impact is really in the food itself and how and where we’re getting it,” Wortham said. “There’s no formula that’s like, ‘Do this and this and you’ll have this result.’ There’s so much information and misinformation out there, so we have to decide what to do with it all.”
Composting, Wortham said, is more difficult to figure out in urban environments. Populus Denver has a biodigester machine in the hotel’s loading dock area that can break down all food scraps instead of having them sit (and rot) in a compost bin for a week. Then, when the machine is full, a truck will come to pick it up, bring it to a composting facility, and replace it with another machine.
“Composting as a carbon equivalent greenhouse gas mitigation tactic was something that I hadn’t thought of as being so impactful,” Wortham said. “There are not a ton of places that have a machine like this — only one other hotel in the Denver area has one way up in the mountains.”
Beyond composting, eliminating food waste is a significant part of how Wortham operates his restaurants and shapes menus, such as using cherry pits to make vinegar, or adding smoked fish bones that would have otherwise been thrown out to a dish.
In addition to food waste, a crucial part of Populus Denver’s sustainability program is ecologically sound ingredient sourcing. For example, the hotel uses bison instead of beef in many cases since bison farming is more carbon-neutral than traditional beef farming. When the hotel does use beef, Wortham said, it is sourced from Flying B Bar, a local ranch that does not irrigate anything and whose animals are only grass-fed. Flying B Bar is also committed to regenerative agriculture, which is when farmers focus on restoring and improving the health of the soil, instead of just using it.
“It’s really about finding partners that we can work with who produce the products that we need and who are making the right steps in terms of environmental impact,” he said. “Partnering with and supporting regenerative farms can have an impact on a larger scale, food systemwide.”
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