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Members of Leadership Greensboro’s 2022 Class has partnered with RePurpose: Food Recovery, A Simple Gesture, Maxie B’s Bakery & Gallins Family Farm to put on the first ever Mayor’s Food Waste Challenge. During this week-long challenge participating restaurants will commit to tracking food waste, donating wholesome leftovers, composting and recycling. The goal of the challenge is to bring awareness in the restaurant industry and to Greensboro residents that we all have to help eliminate landfilled food waste by reducing food waste in our businesses and homes as well as through food recovery and composting.
Downtown participating restaurants include Cille and Scoe, Crafted, Deep Roots Market, Jerusalem Market, and Natty Greene’s. These businesses will each receive a compost bin from Gallins Family Farm at the beginning of the week and will track food waste per Gallin’s stated guidelines. Maxie B’s Bakery Owner, Robin Davis, will provide a tour of the bakery for participants to learn best practices for sustainability prior to the start of the challenge. Robin has been practicing sustainability in Maxie B’s for years and says: “I am so pleased to see the concept of food waste reduction and sustainability be put forth into reality through this collaborative project that has our Mayor’s endorsement. It would be a game changer for Greensboro if we could bring this topic and solutions into focus for both food service and residents. We all have a moral responsibility to take a clear look at the impact of our old routines and reimagine them for the greater good. The time to tackle this is now…not 20 years down the road.”
During the challenge RePurpose will provide full food recovery service to all participants. Food rescue or recovery is the collection of wholesome edible leftover food that would have otherwise gone to waste from restaurants, grocers, and other food service providers. This food will be taken to vetted non-profit hunger relief agencies and distributed among patrons, all while keeping these resources from needlessly entering the landfills.
Laura Oxner of the food recovery nonprofit, RePurpose, will consult and share with participants the approved NC food recovery policies/procedures. Participants will receive personalized food recovery service throughout the week and beyond; because feeding people is a lot better than feeding landfills! Laura shares these comments: “Greensboro values all its environmental resources, including food. Chefs and grocers work hard at providing the community with plenty of delicious food. We want to show respect and gratitude back to them. One way we can do that is by taking their delicious leftovers to feed those in need in our community. Food plays an integral part in combating climate change. Because it just makes sense to feed people, not landfills.”
Participating restaurants will have access to a diverse forum of peers, industry experts, and ancillary organizations that will provide the contacts, best practices, and technical assistance needed to realize meaningful reductions in landfilled food waste.
Mayor Nancy Vaughan has endorsed the Mayor’s Food Waste Challenge as important to our city and the world and offers this quote: “In Greensboro we are working hard to become a more sustainable city but to do that we need more than electric buses. We also need to focus on reducing food waste in our community and improving food recovery,” said Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan. “Every year tons of food waste is added to our landfills when that food should be donated to feed the hungry or used for animal feed or composting. The landfill should be a last resort.”
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