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 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. 

Note: This post and others includes one or more affiliate links. I only link to products I actually bought, use, like, and recommend. I'm a teacher. If you use one of my affiliate links, you are contributing toward books for my classroom while buying something you want anyway.  

The one with the Veggie Box: Getting Produce from my local CSA

In 2009 I started getting fruits and veggies from a CSA (community supported agriculture). This is a farm in my county that puts out a weekly or bi-weekly box of produce. I get one every other week. For about $30 I get a box with a dozen or so different kinds of items. I'm lucky enough to live in Southern California, so the variety and quality of this locally grown and organic produce is wonderful. 

My February 2023 CSA Box Contents

Before I got a box, I sometimes frequented farmers markets. I know many people enjoy that experience, but I didn't. I struggled to make on the spot decisions about which produce to buy, and I didn't like that I had to remember to go there weekly, within a pretty narrow time window. And it was a time consuming process. It din't fit in my life well when I had two small kids. So, I was thrilled when my friend told me we had a local CSA delivering to our neighborhood. 

I still need to remember to pick up my bi-weekly veggie box. (In all honesty, my husband is usually the one who picks it up from a neighbor's porch a few blocks away.) And I still spend time unpacking and processing the contents. But I like the serendipity of discovering that I like things I would never have chosen to buy. I like to consistency of knowing I will have produce. I like having a selection of seasonal items chosen for me. And when there is something in the box we don't like (looking at you fennel) we drop it in the swap box and another neighbor will pick it up. 

There are several advantages of having one local pick up spot for all the CSA customers in our neighborhood. One is the aforementioned swap box. People leave items they don't want and others take them. Another is the simplicity for the farm in having one drop off point. A third is that if someone doesn't pick up their box, it gets gifted by the drop off host to another friend. (Way better than leaving produce rotting on your porch because you forgot to cancel a delivery.) The food comes in large waxed boxes. We just open our box on the porch, transfer the produce to our own bags and then collapse the boxes for the farm to reuse.

It's prepaid, but I can skip a box if we will be traveling. The farm publishes a list weekly of what to expect to find in the next box. This helps me plan my weekend shopping trip. My son likes broccoli, but I won't buy it at the store if I'm expecting some in our CSA box. 

Every CSA is different, some include eggs, some drop off at your door. Some offer more variety, some less. The important thing is to find one that is local to you, fits your time constraints, budget etc. And when considering the budget part, remember that joining a CSA will reduce your grocery store bill, and maybe even make it possible for you to go shopping for food less often. With the perishables coming through the CSA, I make fewer trips to the store now.