[music] -Today, we're at our Friday distribution here at Tellefson Park in Culver City, and we are bringing food from grocery stores that our drivers have collected this morning and distributing it here in the park.

The beauty of it is we're doing two things with this one type of work we do.

We're both feeding people, and we're doing something that's really important for climate change.

-Martin.

-[chuckles] Pull the lever.

-Pull the lever.

-Volunteer.

Any Volunteers over here, help me unload, please.

-All hands on deck.

-Grab a cart.

These guys have been out doing pickups at the stores this morning.

They start about five o'clock.

They go do their routes, and then they all come back here, and we have about 30 to 45 minutes to get everything out and processed on the tables and open the lineup because once we start to go, that's it.

We won't stop until the line is finished.

-FoodCycle's mission is to feed people, not landfills, and basically what we're doing is create an infrastructure to ensure that all the food that is edible goes to feed people instead of getting thrown into the landfills.

-Offload him quick, and he's got to go right back out.

-What would have happened to this food 10 years ago, 20 years ago?

-It would have gone into the landfill.

Everything would have gone into the landfill.

-One of the reasons that FoodCycle exists is that here in the US, it's estimated that between 30% and 40% of our edible food is getting thrown away.

This is millions and millions of pounds of food.

We started doing this work more than 20 years ago at a time when we would go to grocery stores, and even though we would show up every day, they would still throw food in the dumpster.

-Reducing waste is the most important thing that we can do to reduce our greenhouse gas footprint.

Organic waste is anything that, when it ends up in a landfill, it produces methane.

It can be your food scraps.

It can be your yard waste.

It can also be cardboard or textiles, but food and yard waste are what break down the quickest and generate the most methane in landfills.

By keeping them out of landfill, by first recovering them for human consumption if possible, and then recycling what can't be rescued, we're keeping that material out of landfill, and so reducing the greenhouse gas impacts of that material as it's rotting in the landfill.

-Today, we're going to go to a few markets and pick up some donations of food.

We'll hit three stores, four stores the most, and then we'll come back and unload and distribute the food.

It's hard for people to pay their bills and do this when they can have some food and make sure no kids or anybody's starving or hungry, and they get fed.

-The laws here in California that have been requiring businesses to donate food, to not throw away food, that's the reason why we're able to collect more than 11 million pounds of food now.

This went from one dumpster to us doing 11 million pounds of food a year because of the support of legislation.

-Senate Bill 1383 requires that 75% of organics are diverted from landfills, and those organics are everything from food and yard waste to cardboard to textiles, so anything that, when it's in the landfill, produces methane.

It also requires that 20% of edible food is rescued to feed people instead of landfills, and that's critically important because one in five Californians are still facing food insecurity.

-What we found with SB 1383 in particular, which requires businesses to donate food and requires cities to help enforce that, as it became clear that they didn't have any choice, we saw a huge shift.

We saw that businesses that had been throwing things away in the past now started to donate, and a lot of businesses, it inspired them to make it a priority for themselves and their staff to get this food to people.

-Remember, everything that we have on the tables is all that we have, so be very considerate of that, and try to move through quickly so that we can get the main line open.

-Why do supermarkets even give this stuff to you?

It looks perfectly good.

-It is perfectly good.

All of this stuff, it has to be edible food.

They can't just give us their garbage.

There's nothing wrong with this food.

Some of the food may be close to expiration, or it could be overages that the stores have.

A lot of the stores don't have the additional storage space inside of the markets, and it doesn't make financial sense for them to take it back to their warehouse and redistribute it.

That's the type of stuff that they donate to us.

We work really hard with the grocery stores so that they understand what types of donations they can give to us and what types of donations they should be composting.

-If we were to have done anything different, what I think that would have been is getting that education campaign front and center, along with building the program, because one of the biggest obstacles we've seen is this need for behavior change.

-I learned that we're wasting a lot of food, and we shouldn't, because there are so many people that need it.

I think about it at my house, how I can save food and not just throw food away.

-At home, I tend to cook more, honestly, instead of wasting food.

I don't just let it sit there.

When I go grocery shopping, I'm more mindful, "Am I really going to use this, or do I want it just because it's on sale?"

Definitely just being more mindful of what I'm bringing in the house, mindful more of what I'm putting in my body too.

-I think people need to know more about success stories around the environment to also understand that it's possible to move the needle instead of feeling like, "It's so big, let's walk away."

It's not too hard.

[chuckles] It just needs to be one step at a time, and the past 20 years have shown me that.

-Thanks for watching.

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