For Planet

Goodwill Not Landfill

In a given year, SFGoodwill diverts more than 20 million pounds from local landfills – the equivalent of 15 football fields – helping San Francisco achieve its ambitious zero waste goals and keeping the Bay Area one of the greenest regions in the U.S.  Ongoing partnerships with the San Francisco Department of Environment reflect the beneficial role SFGoodwill plays in current and future planning around landfill waste reduction.

Giving donated items a second (or third) life through Goodwill harvests maximum value from every consumer product our economy produces before it is salvaged or buried as landfill. With the continued depletion of raw natural resources used to make new consumer goods, Goodwill and other social enterprises that enable re-use, recycling, and repurposing will play an increasingly important role in the emerging ReValue Economy™.

The benefits of keeping donated goods local – and putting them through the local loop of Goodwill – are more than environmental. Goodwill job training and placement programs and our role as a resource to Bay Area micro-economies yield social and economic benefit as well. Click the image below to enlarge.

 

PROGRAM SPOTLIGHT: GOODWILL RECOMPUTE

Electronic waste is one of the most highly toxic substances in landfills. Donated to Goodwill, a used smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop computer, monitor or big-screen TV not only avoids leeching heavy metals into groundwater. Through our ReCompute business, it may also find a second life.

At our ReCompute workshop, technicians refurbish computers and build new systems from harvested parts. Unusable equipment is responsibly recycled. By selling rebuilt computers instead of trashing them, we removed the carbon equivalent of almost 500 cars from Bay Area roads last year while providing training in green-tech jobs. At our stores, local families unable to afford new technology find bargain computers enabling them to bridge the digital divide.