After walking more than 7 miles (according to my phone) around the Javits Center over three days, Ifound one company deserving a mention, Hope writes.
LiquiDonate is a venture-backed startup co-founded and led by Diz Petit, an early Postmates employee.
The company works with retailers to ship landfill-bound inventory to nonprofits and charities through a SaaS model.
How it works: LiquiDonate has a "matching algorithm" to ensure that schools and other recipients get only the items they want, Petit tells Axios.
Donating, she says, is cheaper than sending these products to landfills.
By the numbers: The cost of processing a return that may end up in a landfill, for example, can be about $15 an item — when considering the return shipping, warehouse storage, and labor costs needed to sort, evaluate, repack and ship items.
With LiquiDonate, Petit says the company can save retailers at least half of that cost and get a tax write-off to boot.
