Back to School: How Can My Child’s Lunch Be Made Low or Zero Waste?

Yes, it absolutely can! By making school lunches more eco-friendly, and by encouraging your kid to recycle and compost, you can significantly reduce your household’s waste. Some helpful guidelines are… An added bonus of paying attention to these guidelines is that you can determine what materials your child’s lunch containers are made of. For example,…

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Picnic in sustainable style!

The weather is warm and the sun is shining, making it a lovely time to picnic. It’s easy to wrap your picnic food in plastic wrap, put it all in a bag and throw all your trash away at the nearest trashcan. However, the earth, the water, the landfill, and your garden will all thank…

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To Reduce Food Waste, Investors and Community Organizations Need to be at the Table

By Bea Miñana (Closed Loop Partners) and Jessica Toth (Solana Center for Environmental Innovation) Food waste is created at every point in our current food supply chain––on the farm, during manufacturing and transportation, on store shelves, at restaurants, and in our homes. Today, most of that uneaten food ends up in landfills, or is otherwise…

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Recycling – Why is it important?

Recycling conserves natural resources and lets us skip the harmful extraction and refining process that goes into making products from virgin materials. Making stuff from the materials of other stuff uses less energy and water and stops that stuff from filling our landfills. Recycling one… Plus, recycling accounts for 3.1 million jobs in the U.S.…

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Methods to Reduce Waste

Waste occurs in many areas of a business, but each cause of waste has a myriad of solutions that will reduce waste, save money, and build a more dedicated team and customer following. Once you understand what is being wasted in your business and why, you can begin to reduce this waste by implementing some…

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Understanding Your Business’s Waste

The first and most important step to reducing waste is understanding what you are wasting and why. Food waste from restaurants can occur before the food is served from over-ordering ingredients, improper storage, and inefficient menus, or after the customer has received the food because of too large portion sizes and wasteful serving practices. There are…

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EPS Food Container Alternative List

EPS is “expanded polystyrene,” commonly known by the brand name Styrofoam™.  There are environmental concerns with EPS, including difficulty in recycling, source of man-made marine debris, and greenhouse gas emissions from the embedded energy of the manufacturing process. Additionally, EPS food containers are not fully recyclable in a single-stream process because they break up in…

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Food Recovery and Donation

Reducing is always the best method to solve our food waste problem, but when we are not able to reduce, we can still rescue and divert in order to use food waste as a valuable resource and not add it to the landfill. If the food is still edible, donate it to help those in…

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Food Safety and Waste Prevention

Even if we’ve planned to the tee and followed all the best techniques, sometimes things don’t go exactly how we want. It’s important to understand when to call it quits and compost that food instead, but many people are too quick to toss out edible food because of confusing labels or cosmetic imperfections. Food Labels…

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