Just when a temporary halt to statewide deposit bottle and can collections had Newtown residents wondering what to do with growing mountains of beverage and other recyclable containers, a hearty group of volunteers struck gold with an idea to hold a contact-free collection drive Saturday, May 9, to benefit FAITH Food Pantry.

Rolling it together with a food and household goods collection for FAITH patrons, a contingent of volunteers representing Maple Craft Foods, Superior Remodelers, and Associated Refuse, in coordination with Newtown Human Services grabbed bags and bags... and more bags stuffed with cast off containers.

At one point it looked like an endless convoy of vehicles trundling up one-by-one to a windswept collection site at Reed Intermediate School.

And the results were better than anyone anticipated.

“What, we’re just about an hour in and we already had to send out for more collection bags and containers,” co-organizer Dave Ackert told The Newtown Bee just before 10 am on Saturday. “And our van is already half full of food donations.”

That point was punctuated as Ackert pulled open the side door of a Maple Craft Foods van and donated items gently tumbled out like coins from a slot machine.

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Long before the collected items were trucked to a redemption center and converted into additional cash for the local food pantry, Ackert was already summing up the drive’s ultimate success.”

“Overwhelming, inspiring, smooth, amazing, you get the gist; I was speechless,” he conveyed. “We originally planned to fill two small dumpsters with cans and bottles — four cubic yards worth. We ended up calling Pat Caruso from Associated Refuse to bring down another one of those small dumpsters, and then again and again and again to bring three more giant roll-off dumpsters filling a total of 110 cubic yards worth of refundable plastic bottles and cans.”

Food, Glorious Food!

To boot, volunteers also collected and delivered four truckloads of donated food and other supplies along with about $1,100 in cash, checks, and gift cards that were handed off as the parade of donors passed through the collection point.

To keep the giving energy going, Ackert said his Maple Craft Foods started offering a “Family Meal Kit Food Pantry Donation” item at MapleCraftFoods.com/Shop, so folks who could not make it to the fundraiser can still contribute.

Donors through this supplemental offer can send a $15 kit with blueberry pancake mix and Maple Craft Foods syrup, or personally order themselves a variety of packages that contain baked oatmeal, challah French toast, pancake/waffle mix, blueberry muffin mix, and add an optional bag of medium ground coffee if desired.

“This will feed four to six people a hot breakfast, twice. There is no delivery charge,” Ackert said, “and they can choose between (recipient charities) FAITH or the CT Food Bank. It is deeply discounted at just $15 (and up). People have purchased about 25-30 of these for FAITH so far, and can still do so.”

Not to be spoiled by their achievement, Ackert admitted drive organizers were not only unprepared for the mountains of cans and bottles, but discovered the state’s redemption centers were not equipped to take in the sheer volume of donations collected Saturday.

“Some of them are closed, and the ones that were expecting us are short-staffed because of distancing requirements. As such, processing everything we collected is likely going to take a few weeks, and involve multiple trips to Stratford and/or South Windsor,” Ackert said.

“We will likely also need to send volunteers there to help them process the countless bags of donations that we collected," he said. "So bottom line, we won’t know the total amount of the donation that we’ll be making to the FAITH Food Pantry for a while yet, but suffice to say that it should be thousands of dollars more than planned.”

Encore, Encore?

Ackert said he was asked multiple times if there would be an encore drive, “and the answer is that we just don’t know at this point.

“We’re asking them to understand that this one is far from over, and that we will let them know if it’s something we can do again based on circumstances down the road,” he added.

Ackert and all the volunteers, including his own children Noah and Sophie, had nothing but gratitude for those who took the time to sort their returnables and to donate.

“We also want to thank Jim Knipe and the rest of the Superior Remodelers team, as well as the always generous and flexible Pat Caruso and Associated Refuse — we hope that people will consider them for all of their remodeling and refuse needs,” Ackert said.

“I would also like to thank Natalie Jackson at Newtown Human Services for helping to coordinate with the various town resources who helped, First Selectman Dan Rosenthal for his support, and of course, the wonderful volunteers at the FAITH Food Pantry who do what they do,” he added.

Learn more about FAITH at http://www.newtownfoodpantry.org/.