Washington Business Fall 2016 | Washington Business

what’s working: sustainability Giving Unused Bakery Goods a New Life This company has been repurposing thousands of tons of bakery products each month for 20 years, ensuring ranchers have quality livestock feed and landfills don’t. employer: Feed Commodities, LLC location: Tacoma number of employees: 32 product: From Salem, Ore., to the Canadian border, Feed Commodities, LLC is the Pacific Northwest’s premier recycler of bakery byproducts into livestock feeds. The company acquires otherwise unusable raw bakery goods around the Pacific Northwest to process at its Tacoma facility. Each month, the plant repurposes thousands of tons of bakery products that would otherwise end up in landfills, turning it into high-quality livestock feed sold in bulk to ranchers. innovative environmental stewardship: To safeguard the environment, the company voluntarily added a regenerative thermal oxidizer to treat the exhaust coming off its production system to ensure emissions remain well below any recordable thresholds and the exhaust from the process is steam. While the addition of this system was not required by the Clean Air Agency, it was an important aspect of the company’s mission as a recycler to minimize the carbon footprint where possible. Of the tons of goods picked up daily, less than 1 percent of what remains after processing goes to a landfill. The company has also taken the lead in food waste reduction through the development of Normandy Waste Management Systems, a web-based software service designed to help the food production community learn how to track and reduce waste in their daily operations. Additionally, the company instituted a smarter trucking system to ensure efficient mapping and pick up of goods as a way to lower fuel consumption and transportation emissions. in their own words: “We try to do the right thing by our community, customers and employees. Producing emissions here that other communities have to deal with is not right. We’ve taken the initiative to ensure we are good environmental n e i g h b o r s i n o u r re c yc l i n g efforts, waste tracking tools and reducing carbon emissions in our operation.” — Jim Seley, President, Feed Commodities, LLC www.normandywms.com www.feedcomm.com fall 2016 23

Washington Business Fall 2016 | Washington Business | Page 23