Cooper Farms was recently honored by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency through the agency’s Encouraging Environmental Excellence (E3) stewardship awards program.
Ohio EPA’s E3 program recognizes businesses and organizations for completing environmentally beneficial activities and serves as an incentive for organizations to commit to ongoing environmental stewardship. Applications are evaluated using environmental stewardship criteria developed by Ohio EPA. All applicants must be in compliance with environmental laws and regulations.
To obtain recognition for stewardship, an organization can work through four levels of recognition: Achievement, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. All levels require a commitment to meet or exceed environmental regulatory requirements.
Cooper Farms received the silver level award, which recognizes a business or organization’s outstanding achievements in environmental stewardship.
The company was selected for the award for maintaining an active recycling team; reducing waste by washing vehicle air filters for reuse; and implementing an effective composting program, composting food scraps, used shavings from animal trailers, eggshells, and expired raw feed material.
A total of 19 businesses and organizations were recipients of Ohio’s E3 awards.
“Through recycling efforts, waste-reduction processes, renewable energy programs, and sustainability programs, these companies are making a major impact in their communities,” Laurie A. Stevenson, director of the Ohio EPA, said in a press release. “I am very pleased to honor these organizations with the Encouraging Environmental Excellence award.”
Founded in 1938 and headquartered in Oakwood, Ohio, Cooper Farms is involved in turkey, egg and pork production.
Cooper Farms ranks as the eighth largest turkey company in the United States, having slaughtered 286 million pounds of turkeys in 2019, a 7.92% increase when compared to 2018.
The company is also tied with Sunrise Farms as the 20th largest egg producer in the United States. Both companies had a flock of 5 million hens at the conclusion of 2019. In February, the Ohio Department of Agriculture approved permits for Cooper Farms to build a new egg production facility in Darke County, which is expected to have six barns that will house about 4 million hens,
