Good morning friends of Care and Share!

Today’s Monday Minutes feature an update from our Chief Operating Officer that she shared during our leadership meeting this morning.

Last week, we distributed 294,000 pounds of food!!!! Can you believe that in just one week, we distributed the equivalent of 245,000 meals?

Any guesses as to how many pounds of trash this amount of food acquisition and distribution created? When you consider all of the plastic wrap, baling wire, pallets, and packaging material used, and then add in the amount of food that was sorted out as not fit for human consumption (expired, damaged, recalled), this could lead to A LOT of waste.

Well, here’s the answer. After distributing nearly 300,000 pounds of food in one week, our total trash equated to just 24 pounds. This is because of our amazing zero waste program, which allows us to divert at least 85% of our waste from landfills. We recycle (and sell) plastic, cardboard, and pallets, and waste food goes to farmers. To learn more about this process, please revisit our blog post from Brendan McCrann from Future Pointe. Future Pointe is a key partner in our landfill diversion process.

We are proud of the work we are doing to be responsible stewards of our environment. To learn more about our recycling program, please click here.  What’s more, we will be expanding our recycling efforts into a full-fledged business called GoalZero Recycling. More information to come!

Thanks for reading and have a great day.