Every restaurant on PLEET carries a score out of 100 and a count such as "Meets 11 of 14". Both come from the same fourteen practices, chosen because they are the ones that make the most difference to how much single-use plastic leaves a kitchen. This page explains how those practices turn into a number, so that a diner knows what they are looking at and an owner knows what would move it.
The fourteen practices
They sit in four groups, and the groups are not weighted equally. The share of the score each group carries is in brackets.
Plastic reduction (35%)
- No plastic bags for takeout.
- No expanded polystyrene.
- No single-use or bio-based plastic. A cup made from corn starch is still a plastic cup for this purpose.
- Drinks and concessions not sold in plastic.
Foodware (30%)
- Reusable plates, cups and cutlery for anyone eating in.
- Paper straws, and only on request.
- Single-use items such as cutlery, lids and sauces only on request.
Waste management (20%)
- Composting food scraps.
- Proper recycling.
Sustainability (15%)
- Sustainable seafood.
- Energy efficiency.
- Water conservation and pollution prevention.
- Vegetarian and vegan options.
- A discount for customers who bring a reusable container or cup.
Within each group, practices carry different weights. Reusable foodware for dine-in counts for more than paper straws, because a restaurant that has gone back to real plates has removed far more waste than one that has only changed its straws. The individual weights are published on the How scoring works page.
Where the answers come from
Each practice has two sources. The first is the restaurant itself: either the Surfrider Foundation's Ocean Friendly Restaurants program, whose chapters confirm the practices of every restaurant they certify, or an owner who has claimed the listing and declared what the kitchen does. The second is diners. Anyone who has eaten at a restaurant can rate the same fourteen practices from what they saw, and those ratings are averaged per practice, so one wrong answer does not swing a listing.
The two sources are blended 70 to 30. The restaurant's declaration carries 70% of the weight on each practice and the diners' average carries 30%. Where nobody has rated a practice yet, the declaration stands on its own. Owners know their own operations; diners keep that honest.
The breadth bonus
A restaurant that meets ten or more of the fourteen practices scores higher than the weighted average alone would give it. Doing many things partially is not the same as doing a few things well, and the bonus rewards the kitchens that have followed the whole list through.
Reading the waves
Every certified restaurant in the directory has already met seven required criteria, so in practice scores run from the mid-sixties to 100. Splitting 0 to 100 into five even bands would show almost everything as four or five waves and tell you nothing. The wave bands are instead set at the real quintile boundaries across the directory, so each band holds roughly a fifth of restaurants. The current thresholds, and the weight of every practice, are on the How scoring works page.