Taylor Farms Receives TRUE Platinum Zero Waste Certification

Taylor Farms Receives TRUE Platinum Zero Waste Certification

Tim Hammerich
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
With California Ag Today, I’m Tim Hammerich.

Produce company Taylor Farms received the U.S. Green Building Council TRUE Platinum Zero Waste Certification at three facilities in California.

They’ve been able to reduce their waste streams by about 90% mostly by focusing on overall waste reduction says Director of Sustainability Nicole Flewell.

Flewell…”So we work upstream with our vendors to try and look at incoming primary packaging on our top 10 items coming into the facility. Whether that's our raw product and and incoming packaging. And we do a whole supply chain assessment where we look at those top 10 items by volume, and then we assess the primary, secondary, and tertiary packaging of each one of those materials. And then we look at, Hey, what can you reduce from this? What's unnecessary or redundant packaging? Or if there's no opportunities there, he can look at it and say, Hey, from this packaging that we're receiving, what's not recyclable and what could we change to increase its recyclability and therefore increasing our diversion.”

But this is not just a one-time reduction, Flewell and her team regularly look for ways to keep improving.

Flewell…”We do waste audits and so we take one day's worth of landfill contribution. We take the our full green team out there. We get decked out and Tyvek suits, and it's a really dirty process, but it's incredibly helpful for the green team to understand what's really getting sent to a landfill. To just kind of gut check the health of the program and see where opportunities lie.”

The company hopes to expand the certification to all of their plants in the future.

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