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 the green bin

This is not a drill. The city crew delivered a green bin to our house yesterday. I've looked forward to this for months now. So much of our trash was food waste. Yes, I am working on making less of that, but when I juice lemons for lemonade I still end up with lemon rinds to throw away. 

Now all food waste, rinds, leftovers goes in the green bin. We also get to include all yard trimmings, leaves, and untreated wood like that weird short log we've had in a corner for a long time. It also turns out we produce a lot of compostable materials in the bathroom: hair, q-tips, and biodegradable dental floss, so I'm going to need a compost container in there. 

But, as tempting as it is to buy some new compost bins, I'm going to take a deep breath and start with containers we already have. The city delivered a "small" food scraps bucket with the green bin, but it is ugly and flimsy. I don't want to see it on the counter and I think it may fall apart quickly with heavy use. 

Yesterday, I gave a good scrubbing to the OXO compost bin we used to use when I pretended I was composting in the back yard. It had some suspicious brown stains on the inside, but vinegar and baking soda were remarkably effective. It's cute and functional, but when it came time to make lemonade and dinner I remembered I had a white three gallon bucket in the garage. I called it the dinner bucket. It was easy to throw food scraps into, and scrape plates into, and after dinner it got dumped in the green bin without hassle. For ease of use, you just can't beat a short term compost bucket without a lid to get in the way.

The challenge now will be adapting my family and myself to these new habits. We have to find a way to store and move food scraps on a daily basis. We have to get used to making a trip to the green bin after dinner, and maybe more often than that. We have to re-evaluate how much non-organic trash we make and adjust the sizes of containers we need for food scraps, trash and recycling. 

You know you're a #zerowaste geek when the arrival of the green bin in the highlight of your week.

The one where I travel by car

Traveling via road trip is one of those times where I typically would use a lot of disposable items, mostly related to food, but also small toiletry items, paper hotel bills, bottled water, plastic bags, etc. 

Planning for traveling with less trash takes some thinking ahead, and some different choices, but it's really not that hard. Let's take a look at my thought process by category. 

Note: This post contains some affiliate links. Some are for items I bought, liked, and recommend. Other links go to items similar to things I got as gifts/swag from conferences. 

Food: 

This is the toughest. Fast food is so easily accessible and delicious, but it does generate a lot of trash. Choice is my tool here. I can choose food places that serve on reuse-able tableware. Panera is a favorite option for that reason, but there are also lots of local restaurants worth trying. Taking the time to get off the highway, and sit down at a restaurant is a good way to make less trash and enjoy the trip more. Google maps now makes it possible to find good food options that aren't within sight of the highway. And when friends tell me about good places to eat in their towns, I add those to my "want to go" saved section in Google Maps. 

Of course many places still want to hand me a plastic cup, so I plan ahead and keep a re-useable tumbler cup in my car. This comes in very handy. I can use it for a drink at a fast casual restaurant and also fill it with water in the hotel lobby. Plus, sometimes a restaurant won't even charge me for the drink if I brought my own cup. 

Snacks are readily available in bulk bins. I bring them along in canvas bags, or Stasher bags. This also helps me not spend money at convenience stores. 

Plastic utensils eventually show up in every road trip, so I bring a fork and spoon wrapped in a bandana. The silverware stays clean and the bandana is a re-useable napkin. I've never really needed a knife, but if I think I might need it I could add that to the kit. Some people like a bamboo utensil kit to save weight, but I tend to pack light enough that it's not an issue. Note: If you are getting take out food, you need to specify that you do not need utensils.

Hotels almost always have a coffeemaker and paper cups to go with it. My camping mug was an unexpected gift from an edtech vendor. I didn't think I would use it much, and then I thought about making tea in a hotel room. I would have to use a paper cup provided by the hotel to fit into the one cup machine. I remembered the camping mug and brought it along. It fit perfectly in the coffee maker, and I didn't have to trash a paper cup. One of the things I like about this mug is that it has no handle, making it easier to pack. The lid means I can use it to pack small items too. Apparently, it is hard to find one without a handle. This Yeti one is similar though. 

Water:

I mentioned filling my tumbler cup with water from the hotel lobby. On road trips I also usually bring 1-2 large water bottles that I filled at home. If needed I can refill these while traveling. Often I travel for conferences and there are usually water stations set up I can refill from. This way I never cave to the $7 bottle of water in a hotel room. (I'm not kidding. That was the actual price of the bottle in my hotel room a few weeks ago. And it was not a very fancy hotel.)

Toiletries:

Ahh, the travel sizes. They are so cute. I used to love going to the wall of bins at the drug store and paying a premium for little bottles of shampoo, sunscreen, and other assorted mini versions... of things I already owned in larger sizes. Of course I also owned cheap tiny refillable bottles that leaked sometimes. And I subscribed to one of those beauty samples boxes that sent me 5-6 small sizes of things every month, many of which became "save for travel" items. Then I would get out on the road and find out I didn't really like that product after all. 

It was in 2020 that I bought my set of Cadence capsules. Fair warning, these are pricy, but they are great for travel. I can easily fill them with the products I already use. (No more buying expensive travel sizes of items I'm not sure I'll like.) And, if I consider what I've saved by not buying travel sizes, these have paid for themselves. Plus, I always have exactly the same products I use at home. No surprises. These capsules never leak. Really, the caps fit tight and I've never had a leak issue through lots of flying and driving. They are adorable, and they magnetically stick to each other to keep them together. The lid labels are also magnetic and swap-able. 

The printing on the lids is often hard for me to read without my glasses, not ideal for the shower, so I swap the label tiles from different colored containers to create color combinations I can distinguish. Each original capsule is .56 oz, which is not large. Now, they make bigger versions too, but I have never felt the need for a larger size. 

Part of the reason some people say they want larger Cadence capsules is to carry shampoo. Since I cary a piece of a solid shampoo bar, I don't worry about that. I wrote about my favorite shampoo bars here. 

Grocery Bags: 

In any road trip there comes a time when I need to buy something, so I always cary an expandable bag. If I'm in my own car, there will also be standard sized re-useable grocery bags in the trunk, but the expandable bag is great to keep in my purse. I have a really compact one that was swag from a vendor a long time ago. I've tried to find similar versions of it to give as gifts. These were as close as I could get. I like that they come in a three pack. I put one in my daily backpack and gifted the others to family members. 

Paper: 

A lot of the paper is already out of our travel process these days anyway. Think boarding pass on your phone and hotels that email you the bill. (That sentence would make absolutely no sense to my grandmother, who was an amazing traveler in her day.) I still manage to cut a little more paper here and there, like refusing the map of the local area the hotel receptionist tried to hand me and choosing paperless receipts. 

With a little forethought, some planning, and by brining along just a few extra items, I was able to remove a lot of the trash from my road trips and make myself more comfortable in the process. 

The one where I own my trash

Part of my zero waste journey is cleaning out my house, downsizing, decluttering whatever you want to call it. And, yes, sometimes in the process that means I'm making more trash, but really I made that trash 20 years ago, or whenever I bought or created that item. I'm just finally admitting it is trash, and it is mine. 

Today I cleaned out teaching materials I haven't used in over 17 years. In 2006 I switched from teaching middle school to high school and I carefully stored all of my carefully curated middle school materials. Seventeen years later they were still in the same spot and I figured it was time to admit I probably won't be teaching middle school again, and if I did I wouldn't be using those materials anyway. 

So here is the part where I get proactive and take ownership of my trash. First of all it's not all trash, but if someone else were clearing out my house it probably would be. To keep most of it out of the landfill eventually, it makes sense to deal with it myself now.

Mixed in with the paper folders are books about each subject. Those are now listed on our local gifting group. The cardboard magazine files that held the folders for each unit are on the gifting group too. Then there are the three prong folders, one for each lesson. They include the teacher directions, originals to copy for students, overhead transparencies, and sometimes laminated materials too. I can't just chuck these in the recycling because there are too many mixed materials in there. 

See, you might think that everything you put in a blue bin gets recycled, but most of it goes through a sorting center and anything that has "mixed materials" is automatically trash, even if 95% of it is paper. So, to own my trash, I need to open every one of those three prong folders and separate the plastic things like transparencies from the paper things. Then I cut off the spine of the folder, the part with the metal prongs. Those go in the trash and now the paper covers can be recycled. 

My husband suggested someone might want the empty folders, but they were pretty messed up, written on, and many had places where bugs had nibbled on them. The last time I needed a folder like that was approximately 17 years ago, so I wasn't going to save them for reuse.

In about an hour I separated materials in over 60 folders and made sure 90% of those materials can get recycled instead of just becoming trash. 

Did I want to spend an hour doing that, not really. But I did want to take responsibility for trash I had created and do what I could to make it more recyclable and less trash? Yes.  

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 cloth napkins

 One obvious, and relatively easy, trash reduction change my family could make was to stop using paper napkins and switch to cloth. I heard cloth napkins were easy to find at local thrift stores, so I intended to go do some shopping. I really did intend to do that. Like any day now. 

The napkins I already owned

I wanted to buy some cloth napkins that were not "special." Something my family could use every day. Something I wouldn't worry about getting stains on etc. 

I do own some cloth napkins. I bought them over ten years ago when I bought the table cloths I use most of the time. To be clear one of these table cloths has been on our table every day for years. They've been washed many times and had all kinds of things spilled on them. But somehow I thought the matching napkins would be more vulnerable to damage? And by matching, I mean they are made of the exact same fabric. 

Finally, I decided we should use some of the matching cloth napkins. I knew exactly where they were, in a cupboard close at hand. I could have easily reached for them anytime.  I took them out of the open box they were carefully arranged in on the shelf. I pulled out four to add to the table. This felt good. We were not going to be throwing away any paper napkins tonight!

And that's when I saw it, the little green label still stuck to the napkin I had bought more than ten years ago. Wow, I've really never used this napkin before?  Spoiler, it wasn't just that one. All of them still had their original stickers. They were so "special" I had never used them at all. Total #facepalm moment. 

Now, instead of a napkin holder full of paper napkins in the middle of the table, we have a stack of folded, clean, fabric napkins, that just happen to exactly match the table cloth. Full disclosure, often they are clean enough to use for multiple meals before getting tossed in the wash basket. 

I've removed the labels (and price tags) from all of the cloth napkins we own, and they are all in full use rotation on the dining table. Some day, I may find myself at a thrift store buying more,  but I have reason to believe these napkins should be good for at least a decade.