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Storefront: Saving Cardboard, Paper & Plastic

Each year, our goal is to improve our recycling practices.

We also make every effort to reduce our resource usage. In one case, by working with our supplier, we reduced 19,000 pounds of plastic by converting from a 2.5-gallon container of cleaning solution to a 1.5-gallon container of ultra-concentrated core cleaning and sanitation chemicals.

Here’s more about what we’ve recycled.

2022 Recycled Materials:

• 616,440,000 pounds of cardboard
  
• 25,670,000 pounds of mixed plastic
  
• 11,118,000 pounds of mixed paper

From our cardboard and paper recycling alone, this equates to saving:

• 5.3 million trees
  
• 2.2 billion gallons of water
  
• 2.8 million barrels of oil
  
• 941,000 cubic yards of landfill space

OTHER WAYS WE’VE SAVED

Here are some other gains we’ve made by conserving resources:

In 2019, we began working with a facility that accepts hard-to-recycle materials and turns them into fuel cubes that are a cleaner alternative to coal. This process has allowed us to divert more than 7,400 tons of materials such as contaminated cardboard, paper, and plastic from the landfill.

We saved an impressive amount of paper by moving our reference materials to an electronic format for our stores. This switch enabled us to donate thousands of binders to local schools, churches, and other nonprofit organizations.