Looking back on 2024, the Preti Green Team is proud to recap some of our biggest hits in event sustainability, turning our ambitious goals into positive impacts on our events, our community, and our planet.
One of our biggest goals this year was to further curtail single-use plastics in our company. Finding viable alternatives is an ongoing priority and we’re beyond proud to share that we…
• Launched a full line of “reusables” inventory, including food vessels, cutlery, and cupware, to use on events and internally
• Designed biodegradable snack bags created solely from plant byproducts
• Upgraded our bar program by transitioning to aluminum cans for water and soft drinks
We composted 8,802 pounds of food scraps in just the last four months! This fall, we partnered with Afterlife Mushrooms, a local indoor mushroom farm, who’s helping us conquer one of our top sustainability goals: expanding our composting program across our events throughout the city! With their help, we’re now supplying the compost to grow the beautiful and tasty mushrooms featured in our menus. A true circle of life story!
Selected from hundreds of NYC-based food businesses, we proudly signed on as an inaugural signatory to New York City’s Plant-Powered Carbon Challenge and committed to reducing the carbon emissions from our menus by 25% by 2030. This initiative has empowered our Green Team with the support and resources to take our sustainability efforts to the next level.
Through our ongoing partnership with Billion Oyster Project, we recirculated 1,040 pounds of shells into NY Harbor, contributing to the restoration of over 122 million oysters in our local aquatic ecosystem. This effort helps filter our local waters by supporting a thriving oyster population, and by extension, other marine wildlife as well. In total, we’ve collected over 208,000 oyster shells from our events—always a crowd favorite!
For the second year, we reached our plastic-neutral goal by cleaning up 6,000 pounds of plastic pollution, ensuring proper recycling and preventing it from being openly burnt, dumped, or ending up in our oceans. Our cleanup efforts directly support the North Sulawesi community in northern Indonesia, one of the world’s most biodiverse marine environments and, sadly, one of the most impacted by plastic pollution. Two years ago, nearly 48% of non-recyclable waste in this community ended up in landfills. We are proud to say we’ve helped reduce that to roughly 3-7% in 2024!
At TPC, sustainability extends beyond reducing food waste and plastics. Our goal is to think creatively to create a completely circular event process. This year, we continued our partnership with Materials for the Arts, donating decor and other event materials to local students, art programs, and non-profits to reuse creatively in their artistic endeavors.
We also began a new partnership with RETI Center in Brooklyn, repurposing corks from our bars to create floating gardens along the NYC coastline. This initiative helps clean our waterways, reduces landfill waste, and creates safe habitats for wildlife to thrive.
Our Green Team not only talks the talk, but we walk the walk by continuously educating ourselves, our clients, and our industry. Our website, our menus, and even our event contracts explain our commitment to these sustainability initiatives because for Preti, what we do is about so much more than catering. Keep an eye out for our upcoming Sustainability panels, events, and more in 2025!