- [Announcer] Support for this program was provided by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, the TomKat Foundation, Sustainable CT and Connecticut Green Bank.

(bright mellow music) - [Narrator] In the state of Connecticut, challenges are met head on by groups of people who believe in the power of community.

- [Jennifer] I mean, what's gonna happen for future generations?

We can't just continue to make garbage and expect it to disappear and go away.

- [Lori] Recovered food is a community resource.

There are other things that can be done rather than just letting good food go to waste - [Lou] Talk to the homeless.

But if you're just gonna talk and they're hungry, it's not making a big difference.

Give 'em something to eat.

- [John] It's important to repair items because of course it reduces waste and it also reduces our demand for new things.

- [Child] We have to live in this world forever.

So the more pollution we do, the harder it's gonna be to live here.

- [Narrator] Local organizations leading these grassroots efforts to help manage waste, have found a partner with Sustainable CT whose crucial support provides a pathway to change.

(mellow bright music) (mellow synth music) - Every single person, no matter who you are, everyone makes trash and it has to go somewhere.

There's end of life management of it.

In Connecticut, if you do hire a private hauler, your material is picked up at the curb and taken to a local transfer station where it's aggregated with everyone else's trash.

And then it's typically shipped to a waste to energy plant somewhere in the state, if there's capacity, where it's incinerated and then converted into energy and it's put into the grid.

(air whooshing) All of our private haulers across the state of Connecticut do a great job in providing that service of convenience.

But if you use your local transfer station, a couple of things are happening.

One, you're likely saving money and typically, the recycled material that is at a transfer station is cleaner.

Material that's in that container that's only the material that's acceptable, the material that can be recycled.

- [Chris] Good morning.

- Chris.

- Good morning.

- How are you?

- How are you?

- We make more trash than we have capacity to manage here in the state of Connecticut.

That's a big problem.

(person laughing) - Park this way- - We know that 22 to 30% of the material we throw away is food waste, it's food scraps, and much of that food is still edible, so we can compost it or we could also donate it.

But we really need to pull our food waste out of the waste stream.

And right there, there's a part of the solution of our capacity in the state of Connecticut.

- Well, that's a great idea, and it doesn't stink.

- Yeah.

- We have- - Yeah, that's cool.

- Long wanted to start a program here at the transfer station where residents can come and drop their food scraps off conveniently while they're doing their trash or their recycling.

We've set up this food scrap recovery system.

And we have five bins and we fill those back bins up and curbside compost comes and empties those bins once a week.

(bin rattling) - This area should have the correct infrastructure for processing food scraps.

It's been sent to incinerators and landfills for so long.

We really kinda should be doing the right thing with this material and not trying to burn it or landfill it.

It can be used as a resource to improve our soil.

- The other thing we did is we started a business program, right.

Because we wanted to have a higher leverage point than just working resident by resident.

We decided to focus on businesses, so we started our business waste reduction program.

It started as recycling the food scraps that they generate that they can't reduce.

- I know that as a restaurant owner, we are strapped for time all the time.

So I see the challenge trying to make a difference but we also have a huge volume of food and recyclable that come through our doors every day.

I was always thinking that we should be doing a little bit more than we are.

- The food that they don't waste in their kitchen first goes to donation and then failing all of that, you go to foods scraps recycling, either to a farmer or to a hauler that comes in and picks it up.

- At first, I wasn't really interested because I said, oh, one of those recycling programs, and yeah, that's too difficult.

It's gonna get in the way.

It's not gonna work for us.

But they really set it up and made it really easier than I had ever would've imagined for restaurants.

That product that I have no use for, somebody else can turn it into a positive thing.

(mellow guitar music) - I'm Jim Templeton, the owner of Aradia Farm where we're sitting right now along with my wife, Vivian.

We've been doing this for about 30 years, a little over 30 years, as a matter of fact.

We raise Dexter cattle, pigs and chickens, as you can hear in the background.

I've been on the reincarnated energy task force with Chuck since it started in 2020, I think it was reincarnated.

And so he knew that we did this, so to speak, and said, "Hey, have you ever thought about using vegetative waste and picking up from hotels and restaurants?"

And I said, "We've been doing it for 10 years or a dozen years."

We just increased it a little bit.

We now cover De Palma's restaurant Downtown and then two hotels in town, the Heritage Inn and Wyndham.

We use it as a supplement, as a matter of fact, for feed.

Depending on time of year, it's better for the animals.

Does have, you know, fairly high levels of nutrients in it and that's why we use it.

(rooster crowing) (mellow synth music) As you can see, they're not shy.

Because it's fresh vegetative waste, you've gotta move it fairly quickly.

Typically it's good clean stuff and that's important to us to be able to feed it out.

(mellow synth music) (mellow guitar music) - I do food recovery, so instead of getting rid of all the food in the stores, they help me to get it to the people that are mostly in need.

- This is the deli basket and Elvis is coming out with the other one.

- Because everywhere you look, people are looking for food.

- Lou comes in daily and takes whatever we have and distributes it throughout Hartford, and Granby, and Avon, and Simsbury, and all sorts of different towns that can benefit from it not being thrown away.

- I decided a long time ago, in fact about 30 years now, to try and see if I can save some of this and give it to those in need.

Hello, can I get some boxes?

I've been an emergency room nurse for 47 years.

Of course, the emergency room takes care of a lot of the homeless and you know, they're are people like you and I.

And they just are having a hard time at this point.

We don't know what it's like until you actually step across the line and see what it's like to be homeless without having a roof over your head, without having food.

They appreciate what you do and I think that's probably the best term I can describe of why I am doing it.

(car beeping) I went to the store, I said, "Wait, what happens to it, all the stuff that you know, you don't sell?"

And they said, "Well, we dump it."

And I said, "Really?"

And at that time, I was going to the shelters to serve meals.

And so I asked to talk to the manager and I said, "What if I pick up the food?"

- I think Lou just heard we had a dinner every Friday and showed up one day and asked us if we could use bread.

(Louisa laughing) And as he went to the Stop & Shops and got bread and pastries, he started discovering that he could get all sorts of other things from them, like produce and cheese and yogurt.

And they were willing to give it to him.

It became a bigger part of our mission to supply even more food to people, and hopefully, healthy food.

- It's always been a pleasure serving others.

And now today, my wife and my daughter joined forces with me and they helped me pick up the food and deliver it to the various shelters and food pantries in the area.

- All this food could just be put to good use.

And because my dad had the connections in Hartford with working in the hospitals, it just blossomed.

Those people that needed it would call and say, "Hey you got anything?

You know, we didn't get a delivery today or, you know we had an over abundance of people and we're outta food."

- It was so much appreciated that, you know I decided to keep going and now it's seven days a week, so, it keeps me busy.

Last year, we picked up and delivered over 147,000 pounds.

- My name is Sean Madden.

I am the head chef here at the McKinney Firehouse Shelter.

I love my job.

I'm one of those lucky people who get up in the morning and don't have to complain about having to go to work.

I get to go to work.

- You like those?

- Hell yeah, I do, man.

We'll put 'em in, I'm actually gonna use these- - Tomatoes.

- I'm gonna use these right now.

- See that.

- I'm making gravy tonight, so this will definitely help out.

This job is really important to me because when I was a kid and I was in and outta homelessness for a long, long time and actually I've learned the appreciation of a good meal.

Yeah, we'll do cheeseburgers.

- [Lou] Ah-ha.

- I can put brioche on a cheeseburger.

It's a great cheeseburger.

Without guys like, you know, Lou and Fran, like, to me, it's kind of obvious that it would not be really possible to be able to feed the people who are hungry without people with hearts like that.

He's the only person that I deal with outside of my job who's allowed to call me on my cell phone.

And he can call me on Saturdays, and I never allow people to call me on Saturdays.

So we need people like him.

- To make a difference, it only takes maybe one time a week, twice a week.

Even your time makes a big difference because these people want to talk and nobody's listening.

They're just discarded.

And you know what, it's worth a fortune just listening to their stories, why they're on the street, seeing how great the organizations are that are trying to get 'em off the street and back to work so they have some self-respect back again.

But they need to eat.

So if you're just gonna talk and they're hungry, it's not making a big difference.

Give 'em something to eat.

- [Person] Food right here.

Pull through.

- [Person] We could water it down.

- [Person] How do you want this?

(mellow synth music) (somber synth music) (child laughing) (children speaking) - [Child] This, one of this.

- [Child] I know.

- You're not gonna use your ketchup?

You're not gonna use you ketchup?

- [Margaret] If we don't clean our Earth now and keep it clean now, then eventually there will no longer be an Earth to keep clean and there's no planet B that we can go to if this dies out.

- So the Green Team has been running a year this March.

It happened because we had a food audit occur at our school and I was called up to the cafeteria to witness it and be a part of it.

And they went into the back of the cafeteria took our garbage bags from one lunch wave, and we sorted all of the trash into food that could have been put in a food share table, all perfectly good food.

And we saw the trash and things that we could sort differently.

It lit a fire under my belly and I thought this is what we need to do.

(children speaking) (mellow synth music) So at first I started by picking children that I knew could miss a little bit of class time and it wouldn't be so impactful.

And I brought them into my room and I showed them a video of this food audit and their eyes were wide.

(bin rumbling) - Ms. Stohler actually brought us to her room and she showed us what happened when there was no Green Team.

So that's how we learned to do to like make the environment better.

- We make sure that the kids throw their trash and compost and stuff in the right bins to make sure that things get outside and into the trucks where they need to go.

- So this is share table.

Here, you will put only uneaten or unopened foods, like apples you haven't bitten into.

- They put the food in and the food that goes into the refrigerator, people can get and open it.

I'll go up there and grab something that I like, like carrots and something else that you might like to go with the carrots, ranch, like I like the ranch to go with the carrots.

- Here is liquids.

If you have like a milk and there's still the milk in it, you pour it out here.

Then you go to recycling, which is where you'll throw your milk carton and any other recyclable items.

This is trash.

You'll put almost everything from the utensil packet except for the napkin.

This is compost.

You put any eaten food or food parts, like banana peels, eaten peas, bitten apples.

And then over here, you're going to set your tray.

And at the end, we do put them in the compost, but you can't put them in the compost when you come here because then the compost will get overcrowded and there won't be enough room to dump all the food.

- So my job is compost.

And so basically, everybody that has foods that they didn't finish can dump it into a bin, and then we take that bin outside, and dump it into like a trash bin almost.

- I learned about it really quickly because I'm used to throwing stuff in trash, recycle and compost because I do it most of the time at my house and I practice a lot, so it's very easy for me most of the time.

And I learn things really quickly.

- [Child] Milks go in the fridge.

- My job is to do trash.

So every day I eat my lunch and go up to the table and I make sure no one throws out the wrong thing.

- I think my favorite part, is like getting the trash, recycle and compost bin and throwing it inside the bins.

(objects thudding) - Our goal is to have zero food waste.

So when places like Bear Path have excess food, they often don't know what to do with it.

So what we do is have our volunteers show up, they pick up the food, and today's food will go down to the food bank.

You know, that food is really useful and resourceful for the community, especially where it's headed, either to the food bank to get shared or to the residential site where seniors are and those sizes are perfect for seniors.

It's really important.

I mean, I think it'll be the change that we need to make as a nation so that 40% of our food doesn't go to waste as it currently does.

Our tagline is recovered food is a community resource.

- Once you get children to believe in it, then they're contagious and they go home and tell their parents, this is what we have to do.

And it, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

My whole point is that if we don't start to this, us teaching the children, then there's no hope.

You can teach students to do anything, right.

We're teaching them all this hard stuff.

Well, we can teach them to do this.

We can teach them to be capable students to do this.

The fact that I don't even come here to the cafeteria, that I know that there's team after team, down to first grade, who are running a program that people said they can't do this, kids can't do this.

Yes they can, and they're running it every single day.

They're doing it on their own every day.

I'm so impressed, I'm so impressed.

- [Child] Recycling, recycling.

- [Child] Trash.

- Oh, compost.

- [Child] Trays.

- [Children] Three, two, one, go, Green Team.

- [Child] Yeah.

(mellow synth music) (upbeat synth music) - To keep items out of the waste stream is really important for a lot of environmental reasons.

I mean, most of us don't associate greenhouse gas emissions to consumption, but actually, when you look at our consumption practices, 42% of our consumption contributes to greenhouse gases of the of the total in the United States.

So that is a huge quantity in my mind.

So anything we can do to reduce waste is reducing that share of greenhouse gas emissions.

Preventing more products from being produced or preventing them from go going into the trash, keeping them longer lived is important in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

A repair cafe is a place where people come with their items that are broken and they say, "Can you repair this?"

And we have repair people on hand to evaluate what's wrong with it and fix it.

Part of the concept of the Repair Cafe is to teach people skills.

And also, it's community building.

So we have people gathering there every quarter who are skilled in repairs and that in itself is community building.

But then you have people coming in with their repairs and they're getting to know those people that are making the repairs and engage in conversation.

So the idea is not for somebody to bring an item in, leave it with us and go away.

It's they're there with the repair, they sit with the repair while it's being done, and they can be engaged with it as much as they want to.

(person speaks indistinctly) (tool whirring) - Oh, I see now.

- [Person] And then, you know, I- - [Person] Good stuff.

- So at the Repair Cafe in Willimantic, I do electronics repair or that's my specialty.

But I'll also do electrical stuff or anything else that's required besides perhaps sewing.

Your customer will arrive at your table and sit down and I'll ask them, "What's the problem with their item?"

People usually have a theory as to what's wrong.

I'll listen to that, but I will make my own determination and then I'll start to, usually, I'll start to disassemble the item and try to figure out what's going on.

- Well, you know, I'm an environmentalist, so part of it is keeping this stuff from being thrown out.

And the other part of it is the excitement of when it gets fixed.

It's just a really good feeling.

See if it works.

- We need that.

- Yeah, right, that's a good one to add to that.

(people speaking) - Ready?

Ah.

Three ways.

Those lamps have a lot of sentimental value.

- Yes, they do.

- I found that out.

- No, it does have.

- I've had more than one- - It does.

- [Volunteer] Person cry when the lamp started- - I know.

Thank you guys so much.

- [Volunteer] Yeah, you're welcome.

- This is important for a variety of reasons.

For one thing, we restore some treasured items to people that they thought were permanently broken.

The items that we fix, often have sentimental value and it may not be worth it monetarily to fix, but the person really appreciates having it back.

It's important to repair items because of course, it reduces waste, and it also reduces our demand for new things.

So it has a substantial impact on the environment.

- We are such a throwaway society now that I think it makes them think about everything they buy.

Like is this something that's going to last?

Will I be able to repair it instead of just buying the cheapest thing that's gonna break down in a year.

It's about connecting dots, and I don't think people in my profession are doing that very well.

But it's probably because we're not marketers, you know, and we don't have the budget to market those ideas.

And we're going counter to our culture which says buy, buy, buy, grow, grow, grow, expand, expand, expand.

I mean, it's totally the opposite of what society's telling us to do.

- It's not for me, it's for my friend.

My husband tried to fix it for my friend but he couldn't do it.

(person speaks) - I'm disappointed that our per capita waste is expanding and the message of waste prevention is not on the radar at all.

Waste prevention is something that is tangible, that we can do and it has an impact.

So how this has changed me, I guess the work that I do, like with the Repair Cafe or like with the projects we're doing now with deconstruction and electronics reuse, it allows me to not fall into complete and utter despair because I'm doing something constructive, you know.

(mellow synth music) (bright synth music) (bottles clinking) (object rattling) - Some tough work, especially on hot days like this, it takes a long time.

This is the most amount of bottles, cans and everything that we've had.

So we try to go as fast as we can so we can be as efficient as we can and get this done with faster than if we were going at a slower pace.

- Whole thing like that.

- [Volunteer] Yeah, I can do it.

- We've got our entire container full of bottles and cans.

It's been overflowing onto the porch.

And what we're doing is we've laid out a table and we're taking all the cans from inside and sorting them into bags of cans, bottles, smaller bottles, two liter bottles, one liter bottles and sorting out all the glass so that way we can send 'em off to recycling centers.

(bottles rattling) (cans crinkling) - The mission of scouting is to build quality leaders for the community through experience and role modeling by adults and also by peers.

So our mission is to build leaders through servant leadership and learning by doing.

So, having the scouts be involved in community service projects like this, gives them the opportunity to do something for somebody other than themselves.

We have to be stewards of our environment above all else because without our environment, we've got nowhere.

This is home and we have to take care of it.

We could just throw it all in a landfill.

But that's really not a sustainable option.

We need to do something better than that.

Really visible reminder of this is something you can do and that we can do as a community together to help maintain the environment and protect the future for the next generations.

- If we didn't provide this service, then the town would have to haul a lot more recycle and I'm not sure that it would all actually get recycled.

It's unfortunate, but a fact of life with a recycling system as it stands today that not everything ends up where we want it to be for reuse.

This product that we take up to the redemption center goes back and immediately gets reused into new containers.

(plastic crinkling) - Recycling is a big thing for our troop because not only do we get a little from it as a little bit of a fundraiser, but we also like to help our community because not everything gets recycled.

It looks that way, but not really.

And we lessen the load on the town for hauling all the material to the recycling stations.

I feel like we're making a big impact.

- I hope they take away from this a environmental mindset, keeping health of the environment front of mind.

I hope they take a sense of pride for their leadership that they're providing to the community by doing this service.

And that's really the point of scouting, is to build leaders through experience.

So having that positive reinforcement and that really clear picture for their mind's eye, if you will, to see their participation in that process is good.

(mellow synth music) (upbeat guitar music)