dragonlady7 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dragonlady7) wrote2019-09-24 05:02 pm
dragonlady7) wrote2019-09-24 05:02 pm
Entry tags:
Reusable Bulk Containers
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One of the big ways we cut down on our personal plastic use both at the farm and at my house is that we shop in the bulk foods sections at the grocery store.
I know this is like– big corporations do 99% of the consuming, but. Since recycling isn’t actually a thing, then reducing your use is really the way to go, and I’ve gotten into this mindset where I don’t tend to generate a lot of waste in a day, and it helps me feel better anyway.
So we joined a co-op and for a while we were going and getting everything in these plastic bags, and after a while I was like, this is actually not helping at all, I now have all these plastic bags that can’t really be recycled and can’t be reused for much.
At the co-op in Albany, Farmsister shows up with a crate full of jars, and goes to the customer service desk and gets a tare weight sticker on each one. The clerk just weighs them and writes it down, so when she fills it, the checkout clerk knows how much to subtract from what she’s buying for the weight of the container she brought in.
Our co-op in Buffalo doesn’t have a desk like that. So I asked one of the checkout clerks, and she was like “Oh! I mean, I have a scale here, that’s how I ring stuff out. I’ll just write the tare weight down for you!”
So now we bring stuff– mostly Mason jars, but old peanut butter jars, and my whole-ass flour canister from home, and whatnot– and get it weighed on our way in, and then we don’t have a zillion plastic bags to not recycle that make a mess in the kitchen.
Ask at your grocery store. Ours, like, thanked us. It was strange.
My next step is going to be making a bunch of produce bags out of old sheets, because Dude still insists on putting every individual vegetable into a separate plastic bag. The tare weight is negiligible, I feel like, so I’m not that worried. (Bananas are sixty-nine cents a pound. A two-ounce cotton bag is not going to break me, at that price. I just weighed one of my small tote bags. It’s .12 lbs, or 1.92 oz, and that’s for a bag with handles). I have some old track pants that are nylon, I might cut those up and use them too; nylon just frays so you gotta use French seams or a serger but if you do that they’ll hold up pretty well. I feel like that might help keep vegetables a little more moist, maybe? I’ll have to experiment.
The other thing I do is that before I recycle containers, since I gotta wash them out anyway, I use them a couple of times. Might as well get just a tiny bit more mileage out of them before consigning them to the “recycling” which we all know is really trash. It doesn’t look as cool as having fancy glass custom containers for everything but then I don’t care if the pasta sauce stains it or if it gets cracked or thrown out.
One of the big ways we cut down on our personal plastic use both at the farm and at my house is that we shop in the bulk foods sections at the grocery store.
I know this is like– big corporations do 99% of the consuming, but. Since recycling isn’t actually a thing, then reducing your use is really the way to go, and I’ve gotten into this mindset where I don’t tend to generate a lot of waste in a day, and it helps me feel better anyway.
So we joined a co-op and for a while we were going and getting everything in these plastic bags, and after a while I was like, this is actually not helping at all, I now have all these plastic bags that can’t really be recycled and can’t be reused for much.
At the co-op in Albany, Farmsister shows up with a crate full of jars, and goes to the customer service desk and gets a tare weight sticker on each one. The clerk just weighs them and writes it down, so when she fills it, the checkout clerk knows how much to subtract from what she’s buying for the weight of the container she brought in.
Our co-op in Buffalo doesn’t have a desk like that. So I asked one of the checkout clerks, and she was like “Oh! I mean, I have a scale here, that’s how I ring stuff out. I’ll just write the tare weight down for you!”
So now we bring stuff– mostly Mason jars, but old peanut butter jars, and my whole-ass flour canister from home, and whatnot– and get it weighed on our way in, and then we don’t have a zillion plastic bags to not recycle that make a mess in the kitchen.
Ask at your grocery store. Ours, like, thanked us. It was strange.
My next step is going to be making a bunch of produce bags out of old sheets, because Dude still insists on putting every individual vegetable into a separate plastic bag. The tare weight is negiligible, I feel like, so I’m not that worried. (Bananas are sixty-nine cents a pound. A two-ounce cotton bag is not going to break me, at that price. I just weighed one of my small tote bags. It’s .12 lbs, or 1.92 oz, and that’s for a bag with handles). I have some old track pants that are nylon, I might cut those up and use them too; nylon just frays so you gotta use French seams or a serger but if you do that they’ll hold up pretty well. I feel like that might help keep vegetables a little more moist, maybe? I’ll have to experiment.
The other thing I do is that before I recycle containers, since I gotta wash them out anyway, I use them a couple of times. Might as well get just a tiny bit more mileage out of them before consigning them to the “recycling” which we all know is really trash. It doesn’t look as cool as having fancy glass custom containers for everything but then I don’t care if the pasta sauce stains it or if it gets cracked or thrown out.