The Dow Chemical Company has teamed up with Keep America Beautiful to award two $50,000 grants for organizations to establish Hefty® EnergyBag™ programs in their communities.
The program is an approach to diverting traditionally non-recycled plastics, like chip bags and juice pouches, from landfills and converting them into valuable energy sources.
The grant application is open to municipalities, non-profits, materials recovery facilities and other qualifying organizations through September 1, 2017. Dow will provide grant recipients with the blueprint to develop a successful Hefty EnergyBag program and will facilitate planning and implementation. Recipients will ultimately manage the programs and solicit involvement of key community stakeholders.
“At Keep America Beautiful, we look for innovative ways to promote and improve recycling and other approaches to divert waste from landfills,” said Brenda Pulley, senior vice president of recycling for Keep America Beautiful. “The Hefty EnergyBag program provides a convenient way to collect plastic materials that would otherwise end up in the landfill and offers a platform to promote positive behaviors to prevent this material from being wasted.”
The grant program builds on Dow’s long-standing relationship with Keep America Beautiful and will be funded through the company’s Global Citizenship Impact Fund, a unique way to unlock business value while driving social impact. The fund provides financial resources for business-aligned global citizenship initiatives focused on three key impact areas: access to clean drinking water, packaging to prevent food waste, and post-consumer waste management.
The first full scale Hefty EnergyBag program was launched in Omaha and has since expanded from 6,000 to 8,500 households. As of June 2017, the Omaha program has collected more than 13,000 bags of previously non-recycled plastics, diverting more than 6 tons of waste previously destined for landfills.
Published in the August 2017 Edition of American Recycler News