A local nonprofit is diverting waste from landfills—
one step (or banana peel) at a time
BY SAMANTHA CARSON
It was a cool February day in 2024 when Cary’s second food waste recycling drop-off site opened in Mills Park. The town’s first food waste recycling program had opened at the Citizen’s Convenience Center in 2022, and in February of 2023 the Town of Cary had announced that the program was so successful that it would become permanent.
The Mills Park site represented the culmination of years of work between the Town of Cary and the nonprofit Toward Zero Waste (TZW) to reduce waste by diverting food scraps from the landfill back into the community. The program has since expanded its efforts into Raleigh as well.
Starting the Journey
It started on Facebook.
Residents Dargan Gilmore and Leigh Williams met in an international zero waste group on the social media site in 2016. Quickly discovering a mutual interest in reducing waste, they started a meetup group with one key difference from similar efforts: It emphasized the journey of moving toward a zero-waste lifestyle instead of trying to do everything at once.
Gilmore had been inspired by Bea Johnson’s book Zero Waste Home, but she found the idea of reducing a family’s trash to an amount fitting into a small jar impractical.
“I was like, ‘That’s incredible. I’ll never be able to do that,’” says Gilmore. “And I read the book, and I was like, ‘OK, I can make steps toward this.’ So Leigh and I were very careful when we named the organization. We wanted to make sure we had that ‘toward’ in it, because it is a journey for everybody.”
Williams and Gilmore started educating community members by holding meetings and setting up tables at local events, but they quickly found they needed a more organized approach. They initially started an LLC, but soon realized that a nonprofit fit their goals better—so they closed the business and opened the nonprofit in 2020. Since then, they have offered informationat numerous events, farmers markets and festivals in the Triangle; taught Zero Waste 101 classes and held events at local businesses.
