Crate & Barrel is often recognized by its black and white logo, but there is a brighter color that it should be known for as well -- green.

From the items Crate & Barrel sells, to the bag you carry your purchases home in, incorporating these sustainable practices throughout its business functions earned Crate & Barrel the Washington County Solid Waste & Recycling Program's Green Business Award. Read more.

Four to 10 percent of food purchased by commercial foodservice
 operations in the U.S. will never actually be served to patrons, according to LeanPath, a Portland-based food waste prevention company. Also, in Washington County, almost 67,000 residents -- 43 percent of whom are children -- don't know where they will get all the food they need, according to 

Feeding America.

There are a number of reasons why food is wasted, including the over-purchasing or over-preparing of food. Luckily, if a business finds itself with surplus food, they can always donate it to a local organization. 

Even the smallest amounts of edible food that can be saved can make a big difference to an organization or a family in need. Numerous restaurants and other commercial businesses are doing their part to reduce food waste and feed people in need. Read More.

Resource Recycling published an article in November 2014 on the recently released Plastics Terms and Tools project. The goals of the project include communicating more clearly with consumers about plastics, helping buyers and sellers communicate when making transactions and enhancing the quality of plastics recycling data. Read more.  

Eggs discarded in a roll cart

Farmers and ranchers across the globe generate 3.3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases each year producing food that will not be consumed, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. And roughly 3.5 billion acres of land, or 28 percent of the world's agricultural area, is used annually to produce food that is lost or wasted -- that's one and a half times the size of the United States. Most of this wasted food ends up in landfills.

Food waste can be created at any point of the farm-to-table process -- production, post-harvest handling, storage, processing, distribution or at the consumption stage.

According to the National Resources Defense Council, 40 percent of all food produced each year in the U.S. gets wasted, which is 10 percent higher than the annual global average. Twenty-five percent of that food loss is due to consumer behavior and habits, according to a 2014 World Bank report. In fact, the average U.S. resident wastes 20 pounds of food each month -- a loss of more than $165 billion nationwide each year.

Consumers in the Metro area can help reduce the volume of food waste by properly storing food, planning meals, making shopping lists, using leftovers and better preparing the food they buy. Learn more at www.EatSmartWasteLess.com.

This past April, roughly two dozen attendees learned how exchanging and reusing commercial materials can help the environment as well as save money. ResourceFull Use is an innovative resources exchange program available to businesses throughout the greater Portland Metro region. The purpose of the free workshop is to provide a setting for participants to create business-to-business partnerships for materials otherwise destined for landfill.  

Held at Nortek Air Solutions in Tualatin, attendees learned from Nortek's Rick Bruncez on how the company reduced its annual garbage costs by over two-thirds. Bruncez explained how Nortek implemented an expansive recycling program, established reuse partnerships for products such as fiberglass insulation and melamine foam and added other sustainability programs to benefit the bottom line.

At the conclusion of Brunecz's presentation, County staff awarded Nortek with the Washington County Solid Waste & Recycling Program's

Habitat for Humanity ReStore's Heidi White informed attendees on the purpose of ReStore, how the locations benefit Habitat for Humanity building projects, which items the store needs and what items it 

won't accept.

This year's workshop was the fourth event put on by the Washington County Solid Waste & Recycling Program. To learn more about Washington County's ResourceFull Use workshops, visit the 

program's webpage.