Our Story

This river and this forest have been our home now for 50 years. The Algonquin and Anishinabek people have lived here for time immor. We hold the responsibility to ensure it will continue to thrive for future generations. This watershed is our home, our work, our community and our playground.

The Riverside Restaurant & Café: We take our waste seriously! Our food waste is either composted to feed our gardens, or fed directly to our neighbours’ ethically and sustainably raised pigs and chickens. All of our meals and snacks are served with reusable plates, cups, and cutlery, which are washed with eco-friendly products. We source much of our food from local organic producers, and we grow many of our own herbs and edible flowers.

Water: By using low-flow and composting toilets, waterless urinals, and low flow showerheads, we minimize our water consumption as much as possible. Our water is treated with UV, so it’s delicious and safe without the use of any chemicals.
We’ve recently integrated river water quality monitoring into our paddling programs, using Water Rangers test kits. Working with stakeholders in our watershed, we help monitor and track temperatures and river levels that are an important spawning ground for walleye.

The Shop: We avoid single-use plastics at all costs! We only sell drinks that are packaged in glass. Anything that can be recycled is sorted and taking to a recycling depot once a week. We are phasing out disposable take-out cups from our café (once we run out, we won’t be purchasing more). When a product we sell arrives in single-use packaging, we contact our supplier with ideas on how this could be improved.

More Waste Info: By using TruEarth Laundry strips to wash our linens, we’ve eliminated another source of plastic waste and transportation costs. Every year we do a roadside clean-up, removing litter and from ditches within an 8 km radius, and waterways. In our office, both sides of every piece of paper are used (It’s a small thing, and small things count).

Energy and Carbon: To help offset our carbon footprint, we partner with Tomorrow’s Air and climeworks to remove 85kg of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. We are investigating the feasibility of installing solar panels to increase our sustainable energy usage. All of our lights are low wattage LEDs. Our staff choose to live in completely off-grid accommodations, using zero electricity for the entire summer!

Education: By bringing more people into the River World, we hope to inspire, deepen and build people’s care and love for our environment.

Next Steps: We have signed the Sustainable Tourism 2030 Pledge, to demonstrate our commitment to improving the sustainability of our business between now and 2030.

The UN World Tourism Organization defines sustainable tourism as “tourism that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities.”

Each year, we are committing to measure and improve our sustainability performance, focusing on the creation of a sustainability management system, guest and employee engagement with our sustainability efforts, decreasing our energy usage, and improving our water conservation efforts.