World Cleanup Day: Creating a More Circular Economy

We participated in World Cleanup Day on Friday, September 20, and we’re proud of our people at Guckenheimer and ISS who teamed up to do good for the planet and our communities, while also taking the opportunity to network together and have some fun. This year, we had 15 cleanup events across the U.S. and in Mexico and Toronto, Canada. Together, we joined tens of millions of people across the globe to help raise awareness and inspire behavioral changes in how we manage waste. 

Cleanup events like this are a great reminder of why we are committed to helping create a more circular economy. While in theory plastic can be recycled in many places, the reality is that about 91% of plastic ends up in landfills or the environment. Over time, plastic breaks apart and disintegrates into tiny fragments — microplastics — which contaminate soil and waterways, eventually entering our food system. It’s estimated that approximately 14 million tons of plastic ends up in the ocean every year, a number that can be difficult to visualize (but understanding the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can help with that).

At Guckenheimer, we are working with our customers to reduce unnecessary single-use plastic usage, change behaviors and develop pilot programs, and test solutions that minimize the use of plastics without adverse impacts on the guest experience. Here are some examples of how we’re doing it:

• Plastic Disposable Gloves. Although plastic disposable gloves are vital, we saw an opportunity to reduce excessive glove usage without compromising food safety by identifying and correcting certain behaviors that led to unnecessary use. By engaging and retraining our teams, we reduced our plastic glove usage by 29%.
• Plastic Film. We observed many instances of culinary operations using film where a reusable option would have been sufficient. By ensuring our teams had the right container lids for various applications, we reduced our plastic wrap purchases by 25%.
• Disposable Items. We were able to identify opportunities to reduce waste by ensuring that the reusable option is as convenient as the disposable one — like creating standardized protocols for reusable tasting spoons and customizing drinking vessels for employees.

These are only the initial steps for boosting sustainability and cultivating a circular economy. Encouraging the use of reusables also makes a tremendous impact in terms of waste reduction, and we work directly with clients to achieve their long-term sustainability goals based on their unique needs and challenges.

We are also committed to partnering with vendors on innovations. This includes collaborating with local coffee roasters to implement reusable tubs with tamper-evident seals in place of the traditional single-use plastic vacuum pouches. We’ve also been working with our produce vendors to explore using paper instead of standard single-use plastic bags for fresh herbs.

Additionally, we have piloted several “plastic-free” programs. These programs are not fully free of all plastic, but their use is limited to the largest format available, where it is reusable, or where a viable alternative doesn’t exist; this program development has helped us enhance our plastic-reduction strategies across client sites.

When it comes to sustainability, we remain focused on collaborating with our teams and vendor partners to find new and innovative ways to implement continuous improvements in sustainability and waste reduction that drive a circular economy. We’ve made great progress in recent years and are excited to see the gains we can make in the year to come.