Arthur Potts Dawson slaps his hand onto a wooden tabletop in the spare, modern dining room of his new London restaurant, Water House. “This is sustainable English ash, treated only with linseed oil,” he says. He points outside to the terrace overlooking the murky canal that cuts through this industrial North London neighborhood and explains that the benches are made from trees that were felled in a storm and that the herbs sprouting in boxes grow in soil enriched with his kitchen’s composted waste. Water from the canal is used to heat and cool the space.

“The restaurant industry has a wanton disregard for the environment,” says Potts Dawson. “I want to be accountable for everything—either reuse or compost it. The last, most terrible word is recycling.”

Potts Dawson is not your typical eco-fanatic. He is a highly regarded chef with 20 years of experience at some of Britain’s top Michelin-starred restaurants, including a four-year stint at the River Café. But these days, his passion for food is equaled by his enthusiasm for reusable delivery boxes and solar panels and for banishing chemical cleaning products from his restaurant—every surface is cleaned with water and microfiber mitts. “If you find a spot of bleach, I’ll give up my job,” he declares.

Several top London chefs, including Potts Dawson, are transforming their restaurants into showplaces for environmental sustainability. In February, Tom Aikens, the youngest British chef to win two Michelin stars (by the age of 26), opened a fish-and-chips shop in West London that sells only nonthreatened species from small-scale fishermen who don’t trawl with nets that damage the ocean floor. Another restaurant, Konstam at the Prince Albert, takes local eating to the extreme, buying 85 percent of its food from within the limits of the London Tube system. The London gastro-pub Duke of Cambridge, perhaps the original spark for much of this activity, was the first restaurant in England to receive an organic certification—nearly a decade ago.

While restaurants in other places are implementing eco-initiatives—a new U.S. chain called Pizza Fusion delivers in hybrid cars and its restaurants are designed to cut down on energy consumption and water use, and San Francisco’s gastronomes have been emphasizing eco-awareness for years—London has become a nexus of environmentally friendly dining. It’s not that surprising, given how green policies are sweeping across industries in Britain. Marks & Spencer, one of the country’s largest retailers, plans to be carbon neutral by 2012; some of its stores are producing electricity with leftover vegetables and other waste. Starting next month, supermarket chain Tesco will label every product with its carbon footprint. Telecom company BT Group buys its electricity from renewable suppliers, and Rupert Murdoch’s media company British Sky Broadcasting Group has been carbon neutral since 2006.

Far from being quixotic vanity projects, eco-minded restaurants are very popular—because of, not in spite of, their environmental credentials. “The concept draws people through the door,” says Oliver Rowe, Konstam’s owner and chef.

The British press has lavished these eateries with coverage. The Times of London food critic Giles Coren called Potts Dawson’s first eco-conscious effort, Acorn House, “the most important restaurant to open in London in the past 200 years.” Rowe starred in a BBC series about finding London-based suppliers for his restaurant. A decade after opening, Geetie Singh, founder of Duke of Cambridge, still does weekly interviews for various media outlets and estimates that her environmental approach generates an extra million dollars a year in sales.