Donation of Hydro Flasks to Eliminate 50,000 Single Use Plastics at MCCAC

By Cole Goodwin

The Dalles, Ore., March 8, 2024

Mid-Columbia Community Action Council (MCCAC) has received an anonymous donation of 168 Hydro Flasks to help them in their environmentally conscious effort to reduce usage of single-use plastic water bottles at MCCAC’s Annex. 

“Homelessness has a lot of garbage associated with it. Being in this facility and now having that infrastructure we can now step back and think about how we are impacting the environment.”  said Kenny LaPoint, Executive Director of MCCAC. “We want to create a better planet.”

At the pallet shelters MCCAC had coolers, water bottles, and other disposable garbage associated with providing food service coming in everyday.

The donation will help eliminate the use of some 50,000 single-use plastic water bottles a year. Single use plastic water bottles take around 450 years to decompose in landfills.

“I did some math and on the low end we are handing out roughly 50,000 single use plastic water bottles a year. And that’s if we gave everyone of our clients a single water bottle a day. So we’re likely going through a lot more than that,” said LaPoint.

The bottles have been distributed to MCCAC’s clients and MCCAC has installed filtered water bottle fill stations at The Annex.