At first Earth Island Corp. thought its goal last year to produce zero waste would cost it a lot of money. Instead, the Chatsworth maker of vegan mayonnaise and salad dressings found the efforts save the company $25,000 a month, and cost only a few thousand dollars to implement. And, as a recognized zero waste producer, Earth Island may have a better chance at selling to supermarkets and consumers who want suppliers with green practices. The company’s efforts have been recognized by Green Business Certification Inc., the organization that certifies LEED buildings, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, for the Green Building Council. It just awarded Earth Island a Gold Level Zero Waste certificate that says the company avoided sending 97 percent of its total waste to landfills last year. It took the 45-year-old maker of Follow Your Heart Vegenaise, which also operates the Follow Your Heart Market & Café in Canoga Park, a year to get there. Sheena DeBellis, director of sustainability, said the company did it by greatly increasing its overall materials recycling, particularly plastic. In one instance, the supplier that delivers the truck-sized plastic bags of cooking oil called flexi tanks to Earth Island now takes them back and recycles them, DeBellis said. Another significant effort was recycling the single-use gloves that staff wear in the food plant. Recycling the synthetic nitrile gloves dirtied with food or oil meant finding a new supplier to take them back and recycle them, testing the new gloves’ functionality and developing a return system for the supplier. But the gloves now live a second life as park benches and flower pots. “That was a cost for us – we had to pay more for those gloves,” DeBellis said. Earth Island also made a huge dent in its plastic waste by buying a few automatic plastic shrink wrappers for pallets of products. Employees had been wrapping them manually, DeBellis explained. “It was not on our radar till we started drilling down that this was a lot of plastic, and how can we reduce it,” she said. A big money saver came through switching suppliers of the plastic caps for its products to make them recyclable. “We’re getting orders faster and cheaper, and there are less materials,” DeBellis said. Earth Island plans to highlight its Gold Level Zero Waste certification in its marketing materials and hopes it will help the company, which sells to 12,000 retailers, get into larger, national customers that are increasingly focused on supplier sustainability. “In the years to come for those bigger customers, that is going to become more of a requirement – and that is something we’re definitely looking into,” DeBellis said. – Carol Lawrence
