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 laundry swaps: soap sheets and dryer balls

The first, really easy, change I made when I decided I wanted to make less trash and reduce plastic in my consumption, was to swap my dryer sheets for dryer balls,  and my laundry soap jug, for laundry soap sheets. 

The messaging about laundry soap sold in large heavy plastic jugs being a total waste of resources is really true. It is ridiculous that we have let the soap industry convince us that we need to buy huge ugly plastic jugs of mostly water to wash our clothes. Besides the plastic, also consider the cost to transport all that extra weight. Plus, deceptive cap sizes have convinced most of us to use more soap than we need to. So, while the bottle may claim to have 150 loads, most consumers use too much soap and end up getting only 100 washes from the bottle. And, I'm learning, too much soap is bad for my machine and my clothes, when they don't rinse clean. Don't get me started on the plastic waste of pods either.

    Note: This post contains affiliate links. But I only link to things that I personally chose, like, and continue to use. Please consider a link to be my personal recommendation for that item.

Laundry Sheets

I switched to laundry sheets. They come in a pack of 50. And because I have a front loading HE washer that uses less water, I cut the sheets in half. So I get 100 washes from a box that weighs about 1 pound, is packaged in paper, and is smaller than the box of dryer sheets I used to buy. I throw the half-sheets in with the clothes and they work great. Currently, I'm buying these with my Amazon subscribe and save box. 

I also started adding 1/2 cup of distilled white vinegar to the fabric softener dispenser. My clothes do not smell like vinegar, but my washer has lost that funky smell front loaders sometimes get. I think it's because A. I'm now using the appropriate amount of soap via the laundry sheets, and B. The vinegar in the rinse cuts any leftover soap. 

Dryer Balls

My favorite laundry swap is the dryer balls. I read some tips about adding essential oils to them, but I decided to store them in a glass jar with some rocks with oil underneath. (I found this jar at Target for $5) I put lots of lavender and peppermint oil at the bottom of the jar before I added the rocks. The dryer balls smell great and the whole thing is cute too. 

I use all six laundry balls in every load. They are reusable.  I've heard I may need to replace them in 6-12 months. I'll keep you posted. They don't reduce static as much as dryer sheets do, so I added a safety pin to one of them. It seems to be helping. I also bought these through my Amazon subscribe and save box. And I think I'll get more that way to give as gifts to friends and family. 

No one in my house has complained about any of these changes. The clothes are clean. The dryer balls are fun to hunt for when taking laundry out of the dryer, and they are pretty decorative in their jar. Also, we can always tell when there is a load of laundry in the dryer, because the jar is empty. 

You can do this

If you want an easy first step to reducing your plastic consumption and your trash creation, I highly recommend starting with your laundry routine. These changes were mostly cost neutral, and easy. If you use a laundromat then the laundry sheets are a no brainer. They are much lighter than liquid soap. You can even throw them in with your clothes before you leave home and not have to take the whole box. 

I do have to figure out what to do with the liquid soap I have left and the box of unopened dryer sheets. I've been waiting a few weeks to make sure my family would embrace the new laundry routines, but now I think it's time to gift them in our local reuse economy. But that's another post. 

Trash?

The laundry sheets come in a light weight paper box. Eventually it will get recycled. No trash. 

The dryer balls came in a light weight canvas bag. I'm adding it to the bags I use for buying from bulk bins at the grocery store. No trash. 

The vinegar comes in a gallon size plastic jug, but when it is empty I'll take it to a refill store I've been wanting to check out. Reuse=no trash. 

Drying Racks

A post about my laundry routine would not be complete without an honorable mention for my wall mounted drying racks. My family had been air drying jeans and a lot of our other clothes for years on foldable racks that we never actually folded. They took up a lot of floor space and they were flimsy.  I started looking for wall mounted solutions and found these. Love them. They have just as much space as our old racks and they easily collapse against the wall when we aren't using them.  I can reopen them in two seconds. And we can get to the cabinets in the garage again. 

Pictured are the 30" rack above, and the 22" rack below. We have both sizes because that's what fit best in the space. (The prices on these fluctuate wildly from $45-70. It might be worth waiting if the price is high when you look at it.)