Hot New Programs

This grant program is administered by The Recycling Partnership’s PET Recycling Coalition, which brings together a robust group of stakeholders to drive improvements that transform the PET recycling landscape.

The purpose of the PET Recycling Coalition’s Grant Program is to facilitate a number of distinct yet interrelated improvements related to the circularity of PET packaging in the United States:

• Increasing the capture of PET at MRFs, secondary sortation facilities, and/or PET reclaimers by improving process effectiveness and reducing yield loss;
• Increasing the number of local recycling programs accepting PET non-bottle rigids (e.g. thermoformed clamshells, cups, trays;
• Increasing the recycling viability of pigmented and/or opaque PET;
• Optimizing the supply of rPET by aligning rPET characteristics with end market needs.

This program focuses on equipment and process investments that contribute to these desired outcomes. All projects must result in the successful ongoing return of PET to manufacturing use, with preference given to systems returning PET to packaging manufacturing use.

The Community Infrastructure Fund will provide funding for community-based and regional projects in the Delta Regional Authority service area that address basic public infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, and flood control.

Program priorities

• Encourage stakeholders to make programmatic and policy-related changes to prioritize equity and cultural context
• Investments in economically distressed communities and in support of inclusive, sustainable rural communities with access to services; funding; and programs that enable career stability, such as healthcare, housing, education, and food security
• Collaboration among states, economic development districts, institutions of higher education, the private sector, philanthropic organizations, and region residents
• Collaborative, innovative, and evidence-based practices to rapidly reinvest taxpayer dollars in communities
• Use data to inform decisions regarding grants and investments and track outcomes from those initiatives; facilitate thought leadership and data-sharing in order to promote transparency while monitoring emerging challenges and ongoing progress
• Address the challenges and needs today and for the future
• The use of resilient construction methods and materials to protect against natural disasters
• Clean energy demonstration projects that support weatherization and other energy efficiency improvements to reduce energy costs, and which include clean energy manufacturing and workforce development
• Increasing historically underserved community access to affordable, healthy food

Through RCPP, NRCS employs a co-investment approach through which the agency and partners collaborate to implement natural resource conservation activities. The following are three key principles of RCPP.

 

Impact

RCPP proposals must offer effective and compelling solutions that address one or more natural resource concerns to help solve natural resource challenges. Partners are responsible for evaluating a project’s outcomes.

Partner Contributions

By statute, partners are responsible for identifying any combination of cash and in-kind support that provides a significant portion of the overall costs of the project. Proposals will be evaluated, in part, on the contribution of non-Federal resources to the project. NRCS makes investments through the RCPP to leverage the partner’s investments in the project.

Partnerships and Management

NRCS seeks projects that integrate multiple conservation approaches, implement new technologies, build new partnerships, or effectively employ program flexibilities to deliver conservation solutions. Partners must have experience, expertise, and capacity for managing the partnership and project, providing outreach to producers, quantifying the environmental (and when possible, economic and social) outcomes of an RCPP project, and consistently providing technical assistance that follows NRCS or negotiated project-specific technical requirements. RCPP ranking criteria give priority consideration to applicants that meaningfully engage historically underserved farmers and ranchers as well as those that coordinate with other Federal, State, Tribal, or local efforts. 

 

Composting and Food Waste Reduction (CFWR) cooperative agreements assist local and municipal governments with projects that develop and test strategies for planning and implementing municipal compost plans and food waste reduction plans. Implementation activities will increase access to compost for agricultural producers, improve soil quality and encourages innovative, scalable waste management plans that reduce and divert food waste from landfills.

 

The Innovative Clean Energy Loan Guarantee Program (ICELGP) aims to support energy projects that have the goal of using innovation and technology to reduce or mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. The ICELGP encourages catalytic, replicable, or market-ready renewable energy and associated technologies.

 

The Green and Resilient Retrofit Program (“GRRP”) provides loan or grant funding to support projects that reduce carbon emissions; improve utility efficiency; implement the use of renewable energy generation; enhance indoor air quality; or improve the climate resilience of eligible United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-assisted multifamily properties.

 

GRRP was created and designed to improve the quality, health, safety, and comfort of HUD-assisted multifamily housing for its residents, while reducing the greenhouse gas emissions produced by HUD’s assisted portfolio. GRRP provides funds to invest in utility efficiency, renewable energy generation, green and healthy housing, and efforts to make homes that serve the lowest-income Americans and a disproportionate number of older adults and persons with disabilities – who often live in communities particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change – more resilient against extreme weather events.

 

The Clean School Bus Grant Program (CSBGP) aims to improve air quality by replacing highly polluting buses while accelerating the transformation to low and zero-emission alternatives.  The program has multiple funding opportunities to maximize the number of zero-emission clean buses available to school districts across the country. 

The vision of the PROTECT Discretionary Grant Program is to fund projects that address the climate crisis by improving the resilience of the surface transportation system, including highways, public transportation, ports, and intercity passenger rail. Projects selected under this program should be grounded in the best available scientific understanding of climate change risks, impacts, and vulnerabilities. They should support the continued operation or rapid recovery of crucial local, regional, or national surface transportation facilities.