UK parliament to remove single-use plastics from Westminster

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“I get excited when someone says to me: ‘I have 17 trailer loads of excess product,’” says Claudia Freed.  Excess inventory may not be your everyday conversation starter, and it’s not every day that you find an individual who gets excited by the topic. But then Freed is the CEO and president of EALgreen, which is not your everyday philanthropic organization.  The EAL stands for Education Assistance Limited. The organization was founded some 40 years ago to provide a means for manufacturers and distributors to earn a tax credit by donating excess inventory to fund college scholarships. Freed, who joined EALgreen as executive director in 1995, was the recipient of the first scholarship in 1982. Back then, she was an immigrant student who had come to the states from Argentina as an 18-year-old with $36 in her pocket. “When I received the scholarship, I was a student at North Park University studying economics, and someone deemed that I had potential,” she recalls. Funding students with potential remains the social impact part of the mission today.