Committing to the Planet
One Glove at a Time

We’ve all become aware of the difficulties of recycling certain items, and one of the items we use the most was always a problem: disposable rubber gloves. Workers in food service use one-use gloves more than any employee outside of the medical industry.  To maintains hygiene standards, an average worker uses fifteen to twenty pairs of gloves every day.  That translates to more than 200 million pairs of gloves every day for the entire restaurant industry. Unfortunately, disposable gloves are not usually recycle-friendly.

We say ‘usually’ because we found a partner whose passion to help the environment matches our own. Terracycle, headquartered out of Trenton, NJ, made it their mission to recycle items others can’t. For over 20 years, they’ve found solutions to keep all sorts of materials out of landfills and our environments.

One of our accounts out of the Pacific Northwest began partnering with Terracycle in January of 2021 and by November of that same year, we saw amazing success.  Since January 2021, we’ve recycled 3.25 tons of single-use gloves, keeping them out of landfills. That’s approximately ~519,000 individual gloves or 6,494 pounds (equivalent to the weight of a Ford F-250 or an Orca whale!).  The recycled material from those gloves has become everything from bowls, benches, and resources for industrial use.

This is just one of the ongoing plans to support our sustainability commitments, and we want to treat every day like Earth Day.  This program might have started with just one glove, but, as you can see, small changes like this grow over time.