Volunteers for Grappone Automotive Group's 100th Anniversary Celebration

A message from NRRA Executive Director, Reagan Bissonnette:

It was a delight having Juli Heath and Jeremy Gregoire volunteer at the Northeast Resource Recovery Association (NRRA) office yesterday, March 28. We are grateful that they chose to volunteer their time with NRRA, and we thank Grappone Automotive Group for its generous donation of $500 to NRRA. We appreciate Grappone’s support of our mission to partner with communities to make recycling strong through economic and environmentally sound solutions.   

Thanks to generous support like Grappone’s gift of staff time and money, NRRA has been able to support our municipal members—which includes 90% of New Hampshire communities—to continue their essential recycling and waste reduction work for over forty years. In 2023, our members recycled enough material through NRRA to avoid carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to removing nearly 20,399 passenger cars from the road for an entire year.  

     
(Left: NRRA Executive Director, Reagan Bissonnette, with Juli and Jeremy. Right: NRRA Finance Coordinator, Liz Duncan, with Jeremy and daughter Juli)

Juli and Jeremy supported us yesterday by refreshing the visual appeal and usefulness of our large conference room. Our conference room is used both for staff meetings and Member Operations Marketing (MOM) meetings, where municipal solid waste facility operators gather to learn about current recycling markets, recycling best practices, and to problem solve on a variety of topics with their peers. These meetings are a key source of continuing education for facility operators, who are key ambassadors for recycling and waste reduction in their communities. In 2023 over 200 attendees participated in 7 MOM meetings.   

Juli and Jeremy did a fantastic job patching two holes in the walls, one of which had interfered with projecting presentations on a wall. They also painted two white walls and a long green wall in the conference room. The finished room is more inviting for our members and more functional for presentations. Juli and Jeremy also helped install some equipment to make our building more accessible, such as a small ramp for the front door and covering exposed pipes in our accessible bathroom.  

(Left: Installing a new threshold in the front door. Right: painting the MOM Meeting room)

Several of our staff joined Juli and Jeremy during lunch to discuss NRRA’s work and answer their questions about recycling. We talked about how aluminum is the ultimate recyclable with aluminum cans being a great “poster child” for successful recycling. We also discussed how the chasing arrows “recycling” symbol on plastics is a clue that something may be recyclable, but it’s not a guarantee. We also discussed the amount of shredded office paper generated by Juli and Jeremy’s department at Grappone and opportunities for reducing and recycling that paper.  

We are grateful to Grappone Automotive Group for the opportunity to have Juli and Jeremy volunteer at our office yesterday, and we would welcome them back anytime. Thank you also for Grappone’s $500 donation to NRRA to support our mission to partner with municipalities to make recycling strong through economic and environmentally sound solutions.

Congratulations on Grappone Automotive Group’s 100th anniversary!