Home & Earth

Embracing Community

Buy local

Buying local, seasonal produce helps your community in more ways than one. It supports farmers who grow the produce. It reduces harmful emissions in our atmosphere, since local produce doesn't have to travel across the country or to another part of the world or to get to the grocery store. And it's fresh, since it can get from the farm to your table in a short period of time.

Food Lion partners with local farmers and manufacturers who work hard to make sure you get quality produce, every day and at a great value. We work with farmers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, labeling certain fruits and vegetables to help you find the locally grown produce of your choice. Look for produce labeled "Got To Be NC!," "Certified South Carolina" and "Virginia Grown."

Recycle: Add to the landscape instead of the landfill

So many of the materials we use every day can enjoy another life, thanks to recycling. Today's plastic bottle becomes tomorrow's carpet. Yesterday's paperwork becomes tomorrow morning's news. Recycling means less trash goes into landfills, and fewer of the earth's resources go into making new products. Thanks to community recycling efforts, many of us can recycle everything from paper to milk cartons to cardboard quickly and easily.

Food Lion & the Environment

Using reusable shopping bags like those sold at Food Lion is another way to reuse and recycle. If you haven't tried reusable shopping bags before, you're in for a nice surprise. They hold many more groceries per bag than plastic or paper bags. What's more, you can use your reusable bags for far more than grocery shopping.

Use a bag twice a week for 2 years and each bag will save:

• 11 lbs of garbage
• 832 plastic bags
• Enough petroleum to drive a car 60 miles

Our commitment to preserving our community's resources

When you shop with Food Lion, you're a partner in sustainability. You are supporting a company with one of the most innovative and longest running energy conservation programs in the US.

More than a decade ago, Food Lion voluntarily became one of the EPA's first ENERGY STAR partners. Earning an ENERGY STAR label means meeting vigorous energy efficiency standards. Today, we are proud to own more ENERGY STAR stores than all of the other grocery retailers combined.

We are also a founding partner of GreenChill, a new EPA program through which innovative supermarkets like Food Lion voluntarily pursue technologies that reduce the use of ozone-depleting and greenhouse gas refrigerants.

Many Food Lion stores have heating and cooling systems that use only 40% of the refrigerants typically needed. In fact, we have more of these systems than anyone else in the industry. And we're making all new and remodeled stores ozone-friendly in advance of the Clean Air Act requirements.

The point is this: Because you shop with us, we have the resources to install and practice energy-saving technologies that support cleaner, healthier communities. And when we spend less energy, you spend less on groceries.