Treading Lightly: Our Journey to Zero Waste

At GoMacro®, we are guided by Our 5 Principles. One of those principles is “Tread Lightly," and perhaps the most impactful way we live out that commitment is by reducing and eliminating waste at our facility. From the containers and boxes used to hold and transport our ingredients to the way we package our products, there is potential for waste at each stage of a MacroBar’s® lifecycle. However, with creativity, innovation, and dedication, we have found ways to decrease waste and give it new life through recycling, composting, and reusing.

As part of our overarching commitment to a healthier future for both people and our planet, GoMacro is a carbon-neutral company; our facilities are powered using 100% renewable energy, we take care to ensure sustainable sourcing practices, and all of our products are packaged with 100% recyclable or compostable materials. But we’re not stopping there! We're on a journey to becoming a fully zero-waste, landfill-free company. As our company continues to grow, we are dedicated to ensuring that this goal is realized. Led by our Green Team, we are taking thoughtful, concrete actions to continue minimizing our waste and making a positive impact on the environment. Here are a couple of the ways in which we’re taking major strides in our journey to zero waste:

Recycling Initiatives

Even the most sustainably sourced ingredients still require packaging and transport before they can be used in our bars. Rather than tossing out all of those cardboard boxes, plastic drums, and containers, we recycle them! In 2020, GoMacro recycled over 140 tons of plastic pails and cardboard boxes and sent 75 tons of other recycling to partners to reclaim and repurpose. We also reuse many pails and boxes internally for our Farm Share Program in which the bounty of our Wisconsin family farm is shared with GoMacro employees and our surrounding community. Whether recycling happens internally or externally, we take care to ensure that materials used in all steps of production don’t go to waste.

While food safety is also of the utmost importance, it means we use over 150,000 nitrile gloves and 275,000 hair nets each year. However, we’ve found a way to maintain both our food safety and sustainability standards. Instead of sending protective equipment to a landfill, we partner with Kimberly-Clark to recycle over 6,000 pounds of these items annually. Through these recycling initiatives, we’re able to divert hundreds of tons of waste from landfills and help reduce the amount of energy needed to produce new materials.

Reducing Food Waste

In the United States, food waste is estimated to equal 30-40% of the total food supply, which is why we take steps to ensure that 100% of our production food scrap is donated or upcycled. We’re proud to share that our “floor seconds” are donated to Second Harvest Food Bank of Southern Wisconsin, from which they are distributed to food banks throughout the area. Floor seconds are fully manufactured bars that are still safe, nutritious, and delicious but didn’t quite make the final cut for shipment due to incorrect bar weight, packaging errors, or other reasons not impacting consumption safety.

100% of our food scrap that isn’t suitable for donation is repurposed and sent to local farms for animal feed and supplementation. We carry a very high standard for our products, and although a bar might not be fit for retail, that doesn’t mean it has to go to waste! Local farm animals safely and happily benefit from these scraps as high-quality, plant-based food.

Sustainable Packaging

Reducing waste starts with the actions we take within our own facilities – but we also do everything we can to make it simple for our consumers to sustainably dispose of packaging after they enjoy their MacroBars. That’s why 100% of our packaging materials are now either recyclable or compostable.

Cardboard sleeves and boxes, like all of our multipacks and cartons, can simply and easily be recycled in curbside containers. The recycled material trays used for our MacroBar 12-count trays are compostable – toss them in your compost to be naturally broken down, or upcycle them into a planter or other DIY project. For bar wrappers, we have partnered with TerraCycle®, allowing customers to mail in all GoMacro wrappers to be recycled at no cost to them. To learn more about these initiatives and how to recycle your GoMacro packaging, please visit our Sustainable Packaging page.

Our Vision for a Healthier Planet

All of the steps we’ve taken over the years have helped us make incredible progress toward our goal of zero waste, but we’re not stopping yet! To Tread Lightly means to treat our greatest sustainability challenges with urgency. As such, we’re always looking for new ways to eliminate sources of waste or find new methods of reusing and recycling materials across every department and step of production. Together with our team, recycling partners, and consumers, we look forward to making our zero-waste goal a reality and helping create a world that’s healthier for everyone.