What We Do—For Mother Earth and our Community
We also make electrons–gajillions of them – on the roof of our cider mill building. Our 960 solar panels crank out a couple million watts of power from the sun on a decently bright day. Our solar field hasn’t been operational for a full year yet, but at the rate we’re going, we might just generate 100% of our electricity needs ourselves.
We haven’t yet gotten to zero solid waste but we’re working on it–any damaged bottles or cardboard and mixed grade paper gets compacted and sent to a single stream recycling center. We figure we’re at about 95% recycled… and working on that last 5%. Our cider bottles are made from HDPE (#2) plastic, so help us all out, and recycle them when they are empty!
All of our leftover apple pulp gets hauled away by a local dairy farmer–he mixes it in with his other feed products to keep his cows well fed and happy.
And, believing that most everyone should have a nice cold fresh jug of apple cider on their Thanksgiving and holiday dinner tables, we donate as much cider as they can use to our two local food banks, one here in Leominster and one ten minutes away at Devens, so that their client families can enjoy cider with those meals.
