💚 Connecting Gardeners to Pantries 🍎🎥
Affiliate Disclosure
Hey fellow impactful ninja ?
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Stay impactful,
Happy Wednesday 👋
Here are the impactful insights that I have for you today:
- How to reduce food waste by connecting gardeners to pantries 🍎
- How the EU is addressing microplastic pollution 🇪🇺
- The drones that are helping fight deforestation 🌳
- And more… 💚
Imagine you are a gardener and have ample harvest. What would you do with it?
One helpful way would be to give it to your local food pantry so that your neighbors in need could eat your freshly harvested produce.
But would you even know where the next local pantry is or when and how you could donate your produce?
I wouldn’t (ok, that might not be a stretch since I’m not a gardener, but I still never heard about this concept before).
Luckily, there’s one man who made it his mission to change that! So that fresh produce never has to go to waste anymore!
🍎 How to Enable Gardeners to Share Their Harvest With Local Pantries
Did you know that about 50% of US produce goes to waste while tens of millions of people suffer from food insecurity?
🎥 We’ve just launched a new podcast episode with Gary Oppenheimer from AmpleHarvest.org. Gary is a self-described aging geek who worked with computers and communications going back to the 1970s. As director of a community garden in 2009, he learned about the wasted food in many garden plots and created a local hands-on version of what would become AmpleHarvest.org to get the surplus harvests to local food pantries. He is also a long-distance cyclist, hiker, farmer, and dancer.
💚 AmpleHarvest.org is a nationwide nonprofit that is eliminating the waste of 11 billion pounds of fresh garden produce per year. They work predominantly with America’s 62 million backyard gardeners and its 32,500 neighborhood food pantries, which is significantly different from other programs in that food pantries are local and food banks are regional.
Here are three key points that you’ll learn from this episode:
✅ How connecting gardeners with local food pantries is key…
✅ How their unique approach helps reduce food waste and improve food security…
✅ How they were able to scale their impact while staying lean…
📢 More Good News…
🇪🇺 How the EU is addressing microplastic pollution:
- The European Parliament’s Environment Committee has expanded the proposed rule addressing microplastic pollution to include maritime transport.
- Approximately 180,000 tons of microplastic pollution is released into the environment every year, most of which occurs at sea.
- The rule would establish penalties for noncompliance, increase accountability, and combat plastic pollution.
🌳 How drones are helping fight deforestation:
- A pilot project in Austria’s Alps is using drones to protect areas of the forest vulnerable to deforestation by the bark beetle.
- The drones are used to sow birch tree seeds in areas with steep terrain that are typically inaccessible to humans.
- In addition to drones, trees are being planted by hand to reclaim entire mountainsides that have been destroyed by the bark beetle.
- The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a final rule to ban the use of chrysotile asbestos, the only remaining form of asbestos used or imported to the US.
- Exposure to asbestos is linked to 40,000 US deaths per year, and it can cause lung cancer, mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and laryngeal cancer.
- The ruling advances President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot, an initiative seeking to end all cancer as we know it.
🤝 Three Important Awareness Events
🖤 March 25, International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade:
- The International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade was founded in 2007 by the United Nations to raise awareness of the history of slavery and its impact on our modern world.
- Today, the event is used to promote action against racism and create a more compassionate world for all.
🌅 March 27, Manatee Appreciation Day:
- Manatees face many threats, like water quality, habitat loss, watercraft injury, or even mortality.
- On this day, organizations educate people about the struggles of manatees and encourage them to join conservation efforts.
🩺 March 30, National Doctor’s Day:
- In the US, over a million physicians provide healthcare to patients in need every day.
- This day honors the dedication and compassion displayed by doctors and encourages individuals and organizations to show their appreciation.
Related: You can discover all the 115 most important awareness events (for the month, days, weeks) in our awareness calendar for March 2024!
📜 This Week in History
☢️ March 28, 1979: A pressure valve in a reactor at Three Mile Island failed to close, triggering one of the worst accidents in US history. There were no fatalities and radiation exposure was limited to workers on the island.
🇺🇲 March 29, 1790: 10th US President John Tyler took office upon the death of former President William Henry Harrison. His most notable achievement was the annexation of the US state of Texas.
💭 Quote of the Week
“Wealth can only be accumulated by the earnings of industry and the savings of frugality.”
― John Tyler; 10th US President
Share the news with your friends to make a bigger positive impact on the world and society!
Stay impactful 💚
