Marion County Receives $20,000 Grant for Food Recovery/Waste Reduction Program

The Fresh Alliance Food Recovery Program will work to reduce food waste and alleviate hunger throughout Marion County.

Marion-Polk Food Share has 61 agencies in Marion and Polk Counties. Photo by: Tim King

(SALEM) - The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has awarded a $20,000 solid waste grant to Marion County for a program that helps prevent food waste from going to local landfills while also filling a need to provide area residents with nutritious food.

The “Fresh Alliance Food Recovery Program” project grant is among the 15 awarded this year by DEQ to help communities promote solid waste prevention/reduction and conduct household hazardous waste programs.

DEQ is awarding about $475,000 in grants this year.

In most cases grant recipients and/or their partners contribute some type of matching monies, staff time or services.

The solid waste grants program, established by the Oregon Legislature, is funded through fees on solid waste disposal throughout the state.

Since the first grant round in 1991, DEQ has awarded 262 grants totaling nearly $5.5 million.

Under the Fresh Alliance Food Recovery Program, Marion County’s Environmental Services Department contracts with Marion-Polk Food Share Inc., to recover nutritious but perishable grocery store food products and make that food available to those in need of food assistance in Marion and Polk counties.

The grant will cover one year of the program, beginning this spring.

The project includes $84,372 in matching monies from Marion County and Marion-Polk Food Share.

The program targets frozen meat, frozen foods, dairy and prepared deli foods.

During its first year (2005-06), the program collected 334,092 pounds of highly nutritious food from local retail grocery stores, diverted this food from the landfill and made it available to thousands of people who sought food assistance each month through Food Share’s network of 61 agencies in Marion and Polk counties.

For 2006-07, the program expects to collect 450,000 pounds of edible food stuffs.

Eight stores in the Marion-Polk area participate in the program, including four Roth’s stores, three Fred Meyers, and one Albertson’s.

With the grant, Food Share hopes to expand its program in 2007-08 by attracting additional retail food store participants and increasing the amount of food collected to up to 225 tons.

The program will also continue to explore strategies for collecting other types of food “waste,” in particular, agricultural surplus and prepared foods.