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 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.