The Toeroek team has performed several sustainable materials management (SMM) and associated community-based social marketing (CBSM) projects, including an SMM Food Donation project for the Lower Greenville neighborhood in Dallas, SMM for a tribal college and casinos, an evaluation of food waste alternatives to landfilling, environmentally preferable purchasing for climate protection, SMM in rural Alaska, and support to EPA’s Food: Too Good To Waste.
The Lower Greenville Food Donation project, or “Plate It Forward,” started by visiting restaurants and food donation charities to find community members willing to support EPA’s effort to marry food donations from restaurants to minimize “waste” food with community charities that can put the food to good use. This also meant finding a means to bring the waste food from the restaurant to the charity. We developed the program, identified community participants, and enlisted restaurants and charities so that the community participants could then carry out the objectives and sustain the program as a community effort. We developed an advertising campaign using CBSM principals to implement the program, including designing a logo, designing stickers for restaurant windows, designing a magnetic truck banner for the collection vehicle, creating brochures and handouts, and leveraging social media, which also included creation of a short video for a Facebook page.
Fact sheets were prepared under several of these projects, such as evaluating increased recycling efforts and conversion to LED and other energy efficient lighting to save 199 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, which is equivalent to removing 42 cars from the road for a year.
