The one with the zero waste grocery store

I am so lucky to live in a city that has a zero waste grocery store. The Mighty Bin is the amazing labor of love from, Isabelle DeMillan. This is a storefront grocery store in the North Park neighborhood of San Diego. 

The idea is that shoppers bring their own clean containers and refill from hundreds of items sold in bulk. When I arrive, they weigh my containers and either write the weight on the bottom, or use an elastic band to add a tag that electronically holds the information about the weight. As I fill each container they add the item to my tab until I am ready to check out. 

BYO Containers:

Unlike other grocery places, where bringing my own containers makes me an unusual customer, at the Mighty Bin it is totally normal, accepted, and encouraged to for me to walk in with a collection of bottles, canisters, and canvas bags to fill with my groceries. They even accept donations of bottles and jars to give to people who don't have containers, or need an extra one. These get cleaned and sterilized at the store before becoming available to customers. (I donate bottles to reduce our recycling, and so they get reused.)

The reason I love The Mighty Bin is because they have items I can not find in bulk anywhere else. Yes, I live within a mile of a Sprouts, and they have great bulk bins for many of my regular items, salt, sugar, flour, rice, oats etc. The Mighty Bin has all those things too, but there are specific things I can't find in the bulk section of other stores that are available there. Plus The Mighty Bin has liquid things that I can not buy in bulk anywhere else. 

Bulk items I can find there that I can't find elsewhere: 

Arborio rice, baking soda, roasted garbanzo beans, dried blueberries, pretzels, spaghetti and other pasta shapes. 

Liquid items that are hard to find in bulk elsewhere: 

Olive oil, vinegars, sesame oil, maple syrup, honey, dish soap. (I love being able to buy vinegar this way for cleaning, cooking, and laundry.)

They also have a rotating variety of frozen items, which I really appreciate. 

And there is a peanut butter machine we are eager to try once we use up our back stock of peanut butter in jars. 

Here is their full list of products they carry. 

The Best Grocery Store:

The Mighty Bin also partners with lots of local businesses organizations to recycle plastic, collect e-waste, offer classes, order flowers or subscribe to a community supported agriculture box. Check out their Instagram feed for the latest events and ongoing initiatives. 

If you live in the San Diego area a trip to the Mighty Bin is a fun adventure in shopping without packaging. It's a great way to reuse containers you already have. I encourage you to make it a regular part of your grocery rotation. 

Oh, and they were recently voted Best Grocery Store by San Diego Magazine's Reader's Picks. Yay!

The one with less recycling in the blue bin

Recycling is one of those things that makes me feel good. I've always considered myself very good at recycling. Our blue bin has never contained trash and always had clean, dry recyclables. I regularly checked the flyer from the city to make sure the things I put in there really were recyclable. I broke down boxes so I could fit more in. Our recycling cans, yes I have two, were often full on pick up day. 

Folks who know about zero waste, say you should do a trash audit, so you can see what you are throwing away and then take steps to reduce those things. I kind of skipped that step, but I know pretty well what we are throwing away. 

The things is, our trash production is actually quite small. At this point we are usually trashing one thirteen gallon white plastic trash bag a week. Sometimes two, but mostly just the one. 

But the recycling 🙄. In the days before I started trying to reduce waste, we regularly filled both blue trash cans on the weeks our recycling was picked up. At the time I actually thought this was a good thing. "Look how much of our waste we recycle!"

Now, I know better. I shop differently, and I have found some other ways to divert things from our recycling bins. Reuse for the win!

Cardboard

We are happy online shoppers. I don't see that changing. We like our weekly meal plan box. (I'll write more about meal planning at some point, but the meal plan box is less wasteful than it sounds.) We order pet food online. Buying just the one thing I need online is better than going to a store and talking myself into buying more things. So we have boxes. I used to break them down. I still do that for some small ones, but now I make sure to remove any plastic packing tape first, so they can actually be recycled. 

What I discovered, is that I can give away boxes in our local gifting group. (I wrote about the gifting group here.) There are always people getting ready to move, or moving things into storage, or in need of a shipping box. The trick I found, is to wait until I have 5-6 medium to large boxes. This typically takes about 3-4 weeks, and I'm lucky to have an out of the way place to stack them. No one wants to come pick up one box, but they do like a solid collection. Once I have a critical mass, I take a picture and post it on the gifting group. A grateful person, who doesn't have to buy as many brand new boxes, picks them up from my porch the next day. The boxes get reused and I don't have to break them down or fit them in my recycling can. 

Jam Jars

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are popular in our house. So is jam on toast. Therefore we have a favorite strawberry jam that I get at a local market, okay it's Trader Joes. Their reduced sugar strawberry jam comes in an adorable 12 oz glass jar with a nice gold lid. When I started shopping in bulk bins, I needed a way to store items like gummy bears, and other things that I didn't already have pantry storage for. I started taking the labels off these jam jars and they are so perfect for storing all kinds of things. The jars aren't going in our recycling bin anymore, and I keep finding new ways to use them. Peanut butter jars (we buy that in glass now) and wide mouthed salsa jars are also great reuse containers. And I have a pretty solid plan about how donate these when I have too many, but that's another post. 

Drink Bottles

In the past, my family consumed a lot of drinks that came in plastic jugs, usually the half gallon size. Lots of lemonade came into our house that way, but also iced tea, juices, etc. (See the plastic bottle in the image above? That's the last one I bought. We finally used them all up.) Then it occurred to me that it couldn't be that hard to make lemonade. I had lemons from our CSA box, and I've found that sometimes a neighbor picks their tree and leaves out a box of free lemons. I can turn four lemons into 64 oz of lemonade in under ten minutes. I'll put my recipe below. Boom, a major source of bulky plastic stopped showing up in our recycling bin. The version in the picture above is actually made with grapefruit juice because we got grapefruit in the CSA last week and I figured I'd try it. Works great with the same recipe. I got the glass jar on Amazon, so I wouldn't have to store lemonade in a plastic jug. It fits on the shelf in the fridge door just as well. 

Laundry Soap Jugs

I have written previously about my switch to laundry sheets. I've been using them for months now and I'm still really happy with that choice. I didn't have a jug of laundry soap to recycle very often, but those will no longer appear in our recycling can either.  I still want to be able to have bleach around for some uses, but I have learned I can buy it in tablets that come in a much smaller (though still plastic) bottle. So no more bleach jugs either. 

Cleaning Products

I'm not a big fan of cleaning. I'm learning now that part of my lack of enthusiasm came from really hating chemical cleaning agents. One day during the pandemic, it occurred to me to put on an N95 mask while spraying the shower tiles, it helped, but the product still made my eyes sting. No thank you. And of course those products came in plastic bottles. Even when I dutifully bought refill jugs instead of new spray bottles, I was still adding plastic to my recycling bin. 

Looking for ways to reduce plastic made me finally break down and try one of those brands where you buy the glass spray bottles and refill them with concentrates or dissolving tablets. I won't specify which one I'm trying, because I haven't tried the others and I don't feel excessively well informed about the variations. But I will say I love how well these products work, and how much they do not irritate my eyes, nose and throat. They smell good too. My cat, who used to run when I cleaned, actually comes to investigate when I start cleaning with these. I think he likes the smell of it too. My house is cleaner and there is less plastic waste in the blue bin. 

Full disclosure: I am still working through what's left in some of those plastic refill jugs. There are at least 4-5 of them still in my garage. The use-it-up part of switching to zero waste takes patience. I got serious about this in February of 2023. It's May now and we are just starting to be done using some of our plastic packaged items. Eventually, I may finally admit that I should gift things I don't want to use anymore, but in this case, that feels like passing the problem on to someone else. 

Paper

Oh, I'm going to need a whole separate post about reducing paper. It's a process I've been working on for years. 

What's still in the recycling bin? 

Well, paper, I'm still working on that. Some food packaging, mostly steel cans from pet food, and milk cartons. I tried to get my people to switch to milk that came in a glass jug that I could return for a deposit. The funny thing is the fancy glass jar milk came with a layer of cream on top of the milk. I think the dairy considered 'cream top' a feature. My younglings considered it a bug and would not drink lumpy milk. I thought it was delicious, but I couldn't drink all of a 1/2 gallon myself before it went bad. My husband has switched to getting his 1/2 and 1/2 in the pint size glass jars though, and we return it for the $3 deposit, so that's one less small carton in our waste stream every week. 

Making less recycling seems as much or more important than making less trash. The truth is we already made very little trash when I started to consciously try to make less, but we were proudly generating a lot of recycling. As I look for ways to cut single use plastics, and reuse items before recycling them, we are slowly bringing down the volume of recycling in the blue bin. We need to put it out for collection next week, but this time it will be just one can instead of two. Progress. 

The one about grocery shopping

I am still really new to this make-less-trash idea. I've been moving in that direction for awhile, and I've already posted about some things I've been doing for a long time, getting a CSA box of produce, using shampoo bars etc. But I thought, when I decided to actually make a lot less trash, that grocery shopping would be the toughest part. It turns out there were some easy changes I could make there too. 

Food is what we buy the most and consume the most. It creates the most single use plastic, the most recycling containers, and the most trash in our household. The fact that I live with other people who want to eat specific things is what will keep our household from ever being entirely free of single use plastics. 

But, I've made some major progress and convinced them to make several important changes in our habits. I've gone back to doing most of my weekly grocery shopping at the local store that sells items in bulk. And they sell candy. 

Our previous chocolate consumption meant buying a large plastic bag filled with individually wrapped smaller items. It was trash inside trash, just to get to that small bit of sugar. 

My son's sweet tooth, and mine too, are now very happy with gummy bears and chocolate items from the bulk bins. Scooped and bagged in canvas for transport, these are an easy way to reduce our wrapper waste. And, it turns out that the 12oz jars our favorite jam comes in, make great re-use containers to store snacks and candy. (Removing the labels was easier than I thought it would be.)

The list of things I can now buy in *package free* canvas re-usable bags includes: 

-candy and chocolate

-dates, dried fruits, nuts

-rice, flour, salt, sugar

-oats, quinoa, popcorn

A small investment up front in canvas bags was all I needed to get started. I currently own four. They were all .99 cents. So, for about $4 I was able to get started bulk buying. As I use up my existing stock of bulk goods, and need to buy more bulk items in some shopping trips, I may need to buy a few more canvas bags, but I consider the minor investment worth it. The bags have their own weight printed on them, so the cashier deducts that from the weight of the bulk items I'm buying. 

I've also removed most plastic from my produce purchasing by using cloth net bags. The few produce items that don't come in my CSA box, now go into cloth mesh bags. I am still buying berries in plastic clamshells because I love berries in my lunches and that's the only way the grocery store sells them. Sigh. 

Above, is what my latest Sunday shopping trip looked like. A bunch of bulk items, produce in mesh bags, a loose bell pepper, some salmon wrapped in paper, and the boxes of berries. Yes, there is still some plastic, but way less packaging trash than I used to create while shopping. 

And if you think that's not a lot of food for a week, you're right. Remember we also get the box of produce from the CSA, and frequently we get a weekly box from a meal plan service. I'll need a separate post to cover my meal prep and planning strategies. My weekly grocery trip is typically one dinner protein, usually fish. Snacks and candy, some produce, and any bulk items we are running low on. 

A monthly Costco run keeps us stocked for canned goods, a 25 Lb. paper bag of bread flour, milk, butter, and most recently a delicious watermelon, when I realized it was one of the few produce items I could buy there that wasn't wrapped in plastic. 

My grocery bills are going down. Yeah, we are seeing crazy food inflation and I'm saving money buying in bulk because I'm able to buy smaller quantities at the bulk price. When I scoop from the bulk bin, I'm only getting what I need for the week. Learning that I do not need to buy and store large packages of sugar, flour, oats etc. has been a nice side effect of this less trash plan. 

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