(Photos courtesy of Willing Hands)
Jessie Haas
Willing Hands, the fresh food recovery nonprofit located in Norwich, VT., has three missions: ending hunger, improving health, and reducing waste. But as they note in their new Climate Action Plan, reducing food waste is more than just a value. It is a way to address climate change on a community level, where individual actions can have an outsize impact.
Reducing food waste makes ten times the impact of switching to an electric vehicle and is Solution #3 in Project Drawdown’s list (electric vehicles is #26). Simply by following its main mission, Willing Hands is avoiding one million pounds of carbon-dioxide-equivalent (CO2e) emissions every year. They plan to double this negative carbon footprint by 2026. Not surprisingly, the most effective strategy for doing this is to do more of what they are already doing—fresh food recovery.
Why is food recovery such a big deal? In climate terms, there are two main reasons. If food is not eaten, all the CO2 used to produce, package, and ship it is wasted. The emissions rise into the atmosphere without having provided any benefit to people or the planet. Then it gets worse. If food goes into a landfill, it decomposes and produces methane, an extremely powerful greenhouse gas (GHG), up to 34 times more powerful than CO2. One quarter of human-caused climate change can be attributed to methane.
The basics of the Willing Hands’ plan are simple: Get 600,000 pounds more food from new and current local sources, and create a regional food recovery network to provide the remaining 300,000 pounds of food. Each pound of recovered food avoids 1.6 pounds CO2e; gleaned food from farm fields provides one pound of CO2e, and each pound of composted food avoids roughly 0.75 pounds. Tons more food for the community, tons less pollution in the atmosphere; a simple and elegant solution.
But nothing is ever that simple. Willing Hands has several trucks on the road, and a refrigerated warehouse, bringing it smack up against Project Drawdown’s Number One Solution—Refrigerant Management. The chemicals used widely to refrigerate food , along with other substances,for decades contributed to causing a hole in the ozone. The Montreal Protocol forced a transition to different gases, which are benign for the ozone layer but are extremely potent GHGs. Willing Hands’ Executive Director, Gabe Zoerheide, notes that the combination of older refrigerated trucks and rough Upper Valley roads has been a bad combination. Frequent refrigerant leaks have made up a large proportion of Willing Hands’s direct carbon impact. The units have no gauge to tell an operator of a leakage, and there is a shortage of refrigerator technicians in the Upper Valley region. Willing Hands is working with an Efficiency Vermont consultant and expect a 56,000-pound reduction in CO2e. Switching the office from propane-powered baseboard heat to a heat-pump should reduce emissions by another 9,000 pounds.
Willing Hands’ trucks log 40,000 miles annually. By mapping out efficient routes and committing to using the smallest vehicle available for nonregular routes, Willing Hands plans to avert another 6,500 pounds of emissions. Purchasing an electric gleaning van would reduce emissions by another 5,000 pounds.
Other strategies for Phase One include replacing a propane water heater with an on-demand tankless electric heater, replacing one box truck with a delivery van, fostering a culture of efficiency with an emphasis on carpooling.
Phase Two involves writing a vehicle replacement plan, exploring the possibility of retrofitting existing trucks with refrigeration systems that can use more benign refrigerants and tracking independent volunteer driver miles with a view to reducing their impact. With 600 volunteers, this impact is unknown, but likely high.
Outreach is also an important component of the plan. Willing Hands intends to create a replicable Climate Action Plan other organizations can use as a template; make climate and the environment a much more prominent part of the story they tell to the public, donors, and recipients of food; educate about gardening, food waste, and food equity; turn the Willing Hands facility at 198 Church St. into a community hub. Land management will also be important. Willing Hands owns ten acres of garden, orchard, and a composting facility, and grows food on four more sites. They already follow many regenerative practices but plan to improve their composting and soil carbon sequestration, as well as plant a pollinator garden and see if anything can be done to improve the health of the wetland.
The Climate Action Plan is both ambitions and educational, illustrating the power of what most people still do not understand as a climate action; reducing food waste. Willing Hands only needs to keep doing what they are doing to improve the health of people, the community, and the planet.
The website offers clear paths to donate food, find food, and volunteer; individuals can Grow a Row in their own gardens, share a CSA share, or contribute wild game, as well as glean, work in the warehouse or office, or deliver food. For those of us who live too far away, Willing Hands is not looking to expand geographically, but would love to see sister organizations following the same model. Maybe there is room for one in your community.
Jessie Haas lives in a 450 square foot off-grid cabin in southern Vermont with husband Michael J. Daley. She is the author of 41 books for children and adults.
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