The theme for this year’s Earth Day—”Invest in Our Planet—is an especially relevant one for Good360.
As the bridge between corporate donors and charitable organizations, we are uniquely positioned to facilitate investments that drive both sustainable practices and social good. We can serve as strategic partners to companies looking to meet their ESG (environmental, social and governance) goals while also helping our member nonprofits to better serve their communities.
Here are some of the key ways that we partner with our stakeholders across the for-profit and nonprofit sectors to drive sustainability and make a lasting impact on millions of lives every year.
Promoting a less wasteful, more resilient approach to disaster recovery
Research shows that 60% of donated goods given during times of disaster end up in landfills or otherwise go to waste. In 2018, Good360 partnered with All Hands and Heart — Smart Response to launch a campaign aimed at encouraging companies to rethink their approach to disaster giving. The goal is to reduce the amount of waste in disaster response, but also create more resilient communities in the process.
More than 65 major companies have signed our Resilient Response pledge, including the UPS Foundation, Amazon, Walmart, Lowe’s and CVS.
If your organization hasn’t signed the pledge yet, you can start here. By committing to the Resilient Response pledge, you’re joining like-minded organizations to ensure that the right goods go to the right people at the right time throughout all stages of disaster recovery.
Making the logistics of hope more efficient and sustainable
In 2022, Good360 distributed more than $2.5 billion worth of goods, impacting more than 20 million lives around the world. In fact, on any given day, we distribute more than 370,000 items, touching 60,000 people and allowing 465,000 pounds of goods to get a new, useful life—instead of ending up in a landfill.
Since we touch such a large volume of goods every day, we’re doing everything we can to squeeze more efficiency and reduce waste in our supply chain—as well as those of our partners. For example, we have established Regional Operating Centers in strategic locations around the country to more efficiently collect, sort, and distribute products. These ROCs also put us closer to major partners such as Amazon warehouses so we’re able to save on transportation costs and reduce fuel consumption.
More recently, we initiated a project to reuse more of the gaylords that are a necessity in our warehousing and shipping operations. Gaylords (also known as bulk bins) are pallet-size boxes made from durable cardboard. Depending on the thickness of the cardboard (double walled, triple walled, etc.) and their stacking strength, they can be reused again and again.
At our 100,000 square foot warehouse in Gallatin, TN, we go through 1,200 gaylords every 8 days. We are now working with our 3PL partner there to recycle as many of these gaylords as possible. Additionally, we are reaching out to our biggest Community Redistribution Partners to do the same.
Using more sustainable cardboard would also help. We are testing new suppliers that can produce gaylords that weigh less but can still withstand the rigors of sorting, stacking and shipping.
If you represent a company with inventory to donate, please contact us here.
Solving the growing problem of retail returns
American consumers purchase and return approximately 3.5 billion products annually, motivated in part by the growing ease of buying online. But only about 20% of those items are actually defective.
As you might imagine, retail returns create an enormous amount of waste every year. That’s why Good360 has been focused in recent years on partnering with companies to rethink how customer returns should be handled. We see a lot of opportunity to reduce waste while also helping our member nonprofits to better serve communities in need.
In one of our largest initiatives in this area, we have partnered with Amazon to donate 100 million returned items to our nonprofit network. To date, this partnership has touched more than 11 million lives.
The bottom line
In collaboration with Good360, investing in sustainability can be a triple win—improving the lives of people in need, making the planet a better place, and even increasing brand reputation and profits for companies.If you have an idea for a partnership that can achieve these goals, please contact us here.
