Picture the last event you attended. If it was like most events in the U.S., you probably noticed a lot of waste: food waste, plastic waste, printed waste, and more.

Sustainable Events LLC helps organizations and event professionals reduce the negative environmental impact of their events in order to preserve our planet and deliver powerful sustainability results.

The company provides a variety of waste-reducing services for events, including:

• Recycling programs
• Composting programs
• Food waste reduction & donation programs
• Floral donation programs
• Event supply donation programs
• Sustainability measurement & reporting

Since 2015, Sustainable Events LLC has kept more than 35,000 pounds of event waste out of landfills and incinerators. The company has also helped 4 events achieve “zero waste” status by diverting 90%+ of their waste.

Sustainable Events LLC was founded in 2015 by Julia Spangler, who is currently the company’s only employee. (The company operates under the trade name Julia Spangler, Sustainable Events Consultant.) In addition to event services, Julia consults with event planning professionals to help them understand and adopt sustainable practices.

Education is a key pillar of Sustainable Events LLC. To help event professionals get started with sustainability, Julia distributes free educational resources online, has created an online course about zero waste event planning, and delivers educational presentations to industry professionals about reducing event waste.

As a one-person business, Sustainable Events LLC is nearing its capacity for the number of events and clients it can serve. The prize from the People & Planet Award would support the hiring of a part-time event services manager who will help the business be able to provide sustainability services to more events.

Ink Forest believes T-shirts ARE the original social media. Posts on Facebook, Twitter or a picture on Instagram only last for minutes down a customer’s feed. A t-shirt will last for years. So, if you’re going to promote your business, club, school event or cause why not have them printed in an eco-friendly and sustainable manner. 

“What is eco-friendly screen printing?” Eco-friendly screen printing encompasses much more than the use of water based inks. When running an eco-friendly or green screen printing shop you have to consider your supply chain. Knowing where all of your supplies, apparel, inks, solvents and equipment is made and that it is ethically sourced is what really makes it eco-friendly. 

Ink Forest is a Certified Women Owned company specializing in non-toxic water based ink screen printing. We are committed to giving our clients high quality and durable screen printed apparel. Because water based inks do not contain PVC’s or Phthalates, your printed apparel is healthier for you and the environment. Ink Forest will use the People & Planet award to purchase larger equipment and to build a closed loop water system. 

Why do I print this way? Because it’s the responsible thing to do and our clients love it! 

Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company’s mission has been clear for 26 years: To use high-quality, specialty coffee as a vehicle for positive change throughout the coffeelands of Asia, Africa and the Americas.

In 1994, we set out to prove that a for-profit business could create meaningful change through ethical business practices rooted in respect for the earth, the farmer, our co-workers and the consumer.

Our work starts with decades-old direct relationships with coffee farmers. From them, we source only organic, shade-grown coffee. This guarantees that the soil is pesticide-free, and that the farmer is protecting the soil and water quality of their farm. We also ensure the surrounding environment, including critical migratory bird habitat, is conserved, optimizing conditions for growing outstanding coffees.

Our business model is radical and, some say, totally backwards:

1. We BUY HIGH and SELL LOW. We pay as much for that coffee as we can! Then, we sell it to the public as low as we can, so everyone has the opportunity to be a part of socially-just trade.
2. We design and fund People-Centered Development projects in each community we work with, based on the communities’ chosen priorities. This award-winning approach focuses on the real needs of local communities for the ecological, economic and social necessities of life that are often disrupted by conventional development assistance.

Right now, many cooperatives identify climate resilience and food sovereignty as top priority. Together, we have created reforestation projects in Peru, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Sumatra, setting up native fruit tree nurseries and planting over 350,000 trees to date. We are engaging young farmers in Guatemala to continue farming the land of their ancestors, while utilizing new technologies that offer solutions to a changing climate, as well as green jobs to a new generation.

We are currently scaling up our 20-year long agroforestry and water conservation project in Sumatra to save the critically endangered orangutan. Our “Reclaiming Sumatra” project includes purchasing land from palm oil plantations, cutting down oil palms and reforesting with indigenous hardwoods grown in nurseries we started with our farmers. So far this year, we’ve planted 11,000 trees.

The project is decreasing palm lands, increasing orangutan habitat, adding bird-friendly and carbon-neutralizing acreage around the coffee farms, and providing alternative income to the farmers growing and planting the trees. We will donate the Green America award to this project, immediately increasing orangutan habitat and sequestering carbon in Sumatra.

Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company is a certified Organic company, proud to work in cooperation with Fair Trade Federation and B Corps to promote business as a force for global good.

A proven pioneer in the field of social responsibility, social justice, sustainable practices and ecological stewardship, we ask you to join our movement. Together, we can brew great coffee and create real change.

We started Bennett Compost ten years ago with $100 and a dream to make composting easy for people in the city.  Since then, we've grown to a company of 10 employees, and compost the food waste and organics for over 3000 households and businesses in the Philadelphia area.  Our goal since day one - to give Philadelphians the option to compost, even in the city! The average person throws out over 1600 lbs of "garbage" each year. Our composters throw out half of that. 

Food and landfills don't mix.  Food scraps emit greenhouse gasses when they're sent to the city dump and left to rot.  According to the UN, over 30% of the food we grow winds up in landfills, contributing to over 8% of greenhouse gas emissions each year.  

We keep these organics out of landfills and recycle them into compost just as nature intended, using traditional methods and aerated static piles.  This approach drastically reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and creates garden-ready compost in 90 days with the help of our microbe and worm friends!

Winning this grant would allow us to get another compost site up and running before the end of the year. The money would allow us to purchase blowers and timers to set up new aerated static piles and build additional worm bins. These steps would allow us to continue accepting additional material and diverting more waste from landfills.

Planted Table launched in early 2018, spearheaded by two sisters who wanted to make a heart-healthy, organic plant-based diet more accessible to everyone. The meal delivery service offers meals packaged in glass containers. Instead of encouraging consumers to recycle or reuse the glass, the company picks up the empty containers at the end of each week, washes them, and reuses them for the following week. Meal delivery services and food kits often involve loads of plastic containers and trash. Planted Table avoids wastefulness entirely by using glass containers. The company is mission driven over revenue driven, which is why using plastic containers and creating more household waste was never an option for the founders, even though it would be the more profitable option. It’s not about how to grow and scale at all costs; it’s about how to best serve customers in a way that causes the least amount of harm. Harm to people’s health, the environment and to animals. That’s why the vegan company uses glass containers for the thousands of meals they serve Bay Area residents each week. By doing this, they have saved over 100,000 plastic containers from filling landfills and customers say Planted Table helps to greatly reduce their household waste. Along with using glass containers, the vegan company works with local farms for their organic produce. 

Working with glass is not always easy. It’s expensive, heavy and fragile.  It has to be collected from customers, sanitized and stored properly.  But, knowing that we are doing our part to feed families in a way that doesn’t harm the environment makes it all worth it. Winning this award will help us to invest in much needed kitchen and infrastructure upgrades that will allow us to offer our meal plans to more families. Thank you for the consideration.