Green Garbage Project

UPDATE: The winner of the mesh produce bags is Lisa Atherton Smith, who commented on Green Garbage Project’s Facebook page,

“I would love bags like this.  My kitchen tip-Instead of buying cleanser or soft scrub clean your sink with a mixture of half borax and half baking soda. Both come in cardboard boxes.Store and sprinkle it out of a repurposed parm. cheese container.”

I was wandering through my local Fred Meyer last night, trying to find a product I could use as a giveaway this week.  In the produce section, I stumbled across these neat Earthwise mesh produce bags.  I picked up a set for me and a set to be used as my giveaway this week. 

Then I got the bags home.  First, let me say they are cool.  I really like them, they are durable, they can easily replace single-use plastic produce bags from the grocery store, and you can wash your produce directly in the bag.  I put several varieties of produce in the bags and carried them around, ran them under the faucet, and was very pleased.

What I am not pleased about, however, is the packaging.  When I grabbed these in the store, I assumed (and we all know where that gets a person) they were packaged on a cardboard recyclable tag.  Nope.  Turns out that the EarthWise company chose to attach their mesh bags to a plastic tag instead.  Plastic!  When the very point of the company is to reduce our plastic use in the first place! 

Discovering this, I sent the company the following letter (feel free to use part or all of my verbage in your own letters to companies that greenwash their products):

Hi there,

I recently invested in several sets of your “Reusable mesh produce sacks” from my local Fred Meyer.  I plan to use some of these bags for me, and others I will give away on my blog www.greengarbageproject.com  This blog’s purpose is to track my efforts to reduce my personal “trash footprint” to its very bare minimum.  As such, while I find your bags to be an extremely useful product, I am writing to ask about your packaging.

The bags came attached with a stretchy cord to a tag.  In the store, I was under the impression that this tag was cardboard, and therefore recyclable.  Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, it appears as if the tag you use is actually plastic.  This choice of packaging disappoints me, and I’m left feeling as if I purchased a “greenwashed” as opposed to truly green product. 

Are you able to tell me what the cording and tag are made of?  I’m hoping, at the very least, that the plastic is recyclable.  I will post your answer on my blog.

I urge you to consider using earth-friendly packaging in the future, to truly make your product “earthwise.”

Sincerely,

Amy Korst

amy@greengarbageproject.com

As soon as I get a response, I’ll post an update here. 

Update: Here’s the response I received from the company:

Hi Amy, 

I understand your concern, however, given that the produce environment is a wet environment we were unable to use paper to hold the product in place.  The bag is designed to significantly reduce single use plastic bag usage over its lifetime, however, plastic products are ubiquitous in our world and a reusable bag cannot remove the need for all plastic products.

 

We are constantly looking for ways to reduce the needs for plastic and will always strive to find ways to minimize our use of it.  In the meantime, however, we sometimes have to utilize the material in order to deliver our environmentally conscientious products to the marketplace.   

Given your very legitimate concern about the recyclability of the plastic, as well as other similar inquiries received since our launch, we are sending a sample of the plastic card to Waste Management in order to determine what number it may be recycled at on the plastics scale. Once we have this information we will forward to you.  

In addition, when we print a new batch of the stock cards we will include the recycle symbol and plastics number directly on the card in order to encourage recycling by consumers in the future. 

With thanks for your continued environmental support

 

Earthwise Bags

Hmmm.  I don’t buy it, because about two days after I sent my email, I wandered into Whole Foods and found these mesh produce bags by Blue Avocado. 

They were hanging in the produce section and packaged using only cardboard.  Somehow, all the moisture in the air wasn’t causing the bags to disintegrate on the spot.  Looks to me like the Earthwise company needed to do a little more R&D before launching their product. 

Nevertheless, buying or making mesh produce bags to avoid the throwaway plastic ones is still a good idea. 

In the meantime, I will certainly add these mesh bags to my collection.  I’ll also give away a set of three mesh bags, considering that 3 reusable bags should save a lot of resources – meaning one small plastic tag might make up for itself in saved plastic bags. 

If you want to be entered for these bags, leave a comment here or on my Facebook page telling me what you are doing to reduce trash in the kitchen.  If it’s something I haven’t thought of, I’ll enter your name twice.

If you don’t happen to win, but you’d like to purchase your own mesh produce bags, there are many stores on Etsy that sell these bags for a reasonable price.  There are also tons of patterns online, if you’re interested.  On Etsy or when searching for a pattern, use the words “mesh produce bags.”

UPDATE: The winner of the mesh produce bags is Lisa Atherton Smith, who commented on Green Garbage Project’s Facebook page,

“I would love bags like this.  My kitchen tip-Instead of buying cleanser or soft scrub clean your sink with a mixture of half borax and half baking soda. Both come in cardboard boxes.Store and sprinkle it out of a repurposed parm. cheese container.”

I was wandering through my local Fred Meyer last night, trying to find a product I could use as a giveaway this week.  In the produce section, I stumbled across these neat Earthwise mesh produce bags.  I picked up a set for me and a set to be used as my giveaway this week. 

Then I got the bags home.  First, let me say they are cool.  I really like them, they are durable, they can easily replace single-use plastic produce bags from the grocery store, and you can wash your produce directly in the bag.  I put several varieties of produce in the bags and carried them around, ran them under the faucet, and was very pleased.

What I am not pleased about, however, is the packaging.  When I grabbed these in the store, I assumed (and we all know where that gets a person) they were packaged on a cardboard recyclable tag.  Nope.  Turns out that the EarthWise company chose to attach their mesh bags to a plastic tag instead.  Plastic!  When the very point of the company is to reduce our plastic use in the first place! 

Discovering this, I sent the company the following letter (feel free to use part or all of my verbage in your own letters to companies that greenwash their products):

Hi there,

I recently invested in several sets of your “Reusable mesh produce sacks” from my local Fred Meyer.  I plan to use some of these bags for me, and others I will give away on my blog www.greengarbageproject.com  This blog’s purpose is to track my efforts to reduce my personal “trash footprint” to its very bare minimum.  As such, while I find your bags to be an extremely useful product, I am writing to ask about your packaging.

The bags came attached with a stretchy cord to a tag.  In the store, I was under the impression that this tag was cardboard, and therefore recyclable.  Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, it appears as if the tag you use is actually plastic.  This choice of packaging disappoints me, and I’m left feeling as if I purchased a “greenwashed” as opposed to truly green product. 

Are you able to tell me what the cording and tag are made of?  I’m hoping, at the very least, that the plastic is recyclable.  I will post your answer on my blog.

I urge you to consider using earth-friendly packaging in the future, to truly make your product “earthwise.”

Sincerely,

Amy Korst

amy@greengarbageproject.com

As soon as I get a response, I’ll post an update here. 

Update: Here’s the response I received from the company:

Hi Amy,

 

I understand your concern, however, given that the produce environment is a wet environment we were unable to use paper to hold the product in place.  The bag is designed to significantly reduce single use plastic bag usage over its lifetime, however, plastic products are ubiquitous in our world and a reusable bag cannot remove the need for all plastic products.

 

We are constantly looking for ways to reduce the needs for plastic and will always strive to find ways to minimize our use of it.  In the meantime, however, we sometimes have to utilize the material in order to deliver our environmentally conscientious products to the marketplace.   

Given your very legitimate concern about the recyclability of the plastic, as well as other similar inquiries received since our launch, we are sending a sample of the plastic card to Waste Management in order to determine what number it may be recycled at on the plastics scale. Once we have this information we will forward to you.

 

In addition, when we print a new batch of the stock cards we will include the recycle symbol and plastics number directly on the card in order to encourage recycling by consumers in the future. 

With thanks for your continued environmental support

 

Earthwise Bags

Hmmm.  I don’t buy it, because about two days after I sent my email, I wandered into Whole Foods and found these mesh produce bags by Blue Avocado. 

They were hanging in the produce section and packaged using only cardboard.  Somehow, all the moisture in the air wasn’t causing the bags to disinegrate on the spot.  Looks to me like the Earthwise company needed to do a little more R&D before launching their product. 

Nevertheless, buying or making mesh produce bags to avoid the throwaway plastic ones is still a good idea. 

In the meantime, I will certainly add these mesh bags to my collection.  I’ll also give away a set of three mesh bags, considering that 3 reusable bags should save a lot of resources – meaning one small plastic tag might make up for itself in saved plastic bags. 

If you want to be entered for these bags, leave a comment here or on my Facebook page telling me what you are doing to reduce trash in the kitchen.  If it’s something I haven’t thought of, I’ll enter your name twice.

If you don’t happen to win, but you’d like to purchase your own mesh produce bags, there are many stores on Etsy that sell these bags for a reasonable price.  There are also tons of patterns online, if you’re interested.  On Etsy or when searching for a pattern, use the words “mesh produce bags.”

As this year of garbage-free life draws to a close, we are asked over and over again where we go from here.  We’ve hesitated to answer this question only because we’re not quite sure ourselves.  It’s certain that living garbage-free for a year has drastically changed us for the better – never again will we go back to a creating trash.  We may, depending on our next step, decide to let a few choice items back into our lives, but I’ll go into further detail about this issue in a future post. 

Right now, I want to enlist your help.  We’ve had such helpful, supportive readers over the course of this year that we would like you to help us decide the direction we head next year.  You can expect a brief hiatus in July, while we prepare for our next step, but we have every intention of keeping this blog up and running full time.  Here are the ideas we’re considering for the future of this project:

A. Continue living garbage-free, blogging about garbage-related issues and keeping the blog as-is: This would keep greengarbageproject.com the same as it’s been for the past year.  I’ll blog weekly and we’ll work to eliminate more waste for our lives.  While we’re down to very little actual trash, this would likely include us working to eliminate the amount of packaging we recycle as well. 

B. Take the plunge and move toward living plastic free: Let’s face it, plastic is ultimately garbage.  I’ve talked before about how plastic isn’t truly recyclable in the traditional sense of the word.  Instead, plastic “downcycles,” meaning each time we recycle it, it becomes a less valuable material.  For example, reycled yogurt containers can’t be melted down and turned into new yogurt containers.  The plastic degrades and must be made into a coarser material like plastic lumber.  Ultimately, we reach a point where plastic is simply trash.  This is a problem, too, in that plastic never, ever biodegrades (at least as far as we know).  Instead, plastic photo-degrades, meaning the elements slowly break it into smaller and smaller particles, where it can enter our food chains via animals mistaking these bits of plastic for food.  There are many bloggers out there who are living plastic-free, most notably Beth at Fake Plastic Fish.

C. Use my experience as an environmental activist to enact legislative change, such as Germany’s Green Dot system, through formation of a non-profit and lobbying: Okay, this one scares me, but I can’t deny that collective action can be more impactful than individual action.  We’ve done a lot of good this year and learned a lot, so perhaps it’s time to push this project a little further. 

My biggest epiphany during this project has been that overpackaging is not my fault as a consumer.  Instead, the single-use, overpackaging epidemic in our country is enabled by us as consumers but is led directly by companies that package their products in layers of plastic and sell them to us.  Where’s the incentive to today’s corporations to use less packaging when those corporations don’t bear the burden of disposing of their mess?  We dispose of corporate America’s obscene packaging and we assume the guilt of handling this packaging.

Other countries have different ways of dealing with this issue, notably Germany’s Green Dot program.  Have you ever noticed this symbol on any of your personal care products?  (I’ve found it on my St. Ives bottles).  This dot represents a program in Germany where corporations, not consumers, bear the onus of disposing of their overpackaged products.  Consumers buy products, use them, then throw the empty containers/packaging into a bin supplied by the garbage/recycling haulers.  When containers are returned to corporations, the corporations must either recycle the packaging or pay the price to dump it.  As you can imagine, as soon as this program went into affect, corporations drastically reduced their packaging.  The Green Dot ordinance went into affect in 1991, and between 1991-1995, Germany’s packaging waste decreased by 14% while our rate in the U.S. INCREASED by 13%!  

The U.S. desperately needs a law like this, and Adam and I could work as advocates for such a change.  Of course, I know next to nothing about starting a nonprofit or the innerworkings of political reform, so I’d have a lot to learn.

D. Buy nothing new (except food) for a year: We’d generate very little to no garbage and we’d send a powerful message about where our consumer dollars are going.  We love to shop here in the United States, but there’s really more to life then shopping.  Maybe we can make do with what we have, and only patronize antique and thrift stores for any goods we do need.

E. Boycott corporations, buying only locally made products or patronizing only “mom and pop” establishments: While this has little to do with garbage in the traditional sense, we are getting more and more fed up with corporate America’s garbage (as is pretty much everyone else, too, I think).  Would it be possible to only patronize locally owned businesses for our consumer needs?  Can we buy everything locally from small stores in our area? 

F. Go all natural, making sure there are no chemicals or ingredients I don’t recognize in food, hygiene, and cleaning products: This is attacking the “chemical” garbage side of things, but the more I read about the sheer volume of chemicals we encounter in our lives, and their health impacts, the more I want to avoid them.  Could we buy only products containing ingredients we understand?  There are some sticky areas here, like prescription medication and the chemicals foods are packaged in, but we’d figure it out.

Whew!  Please help us decide!  What would be most valuable to you as a reader?  Is there anything we should be considering that we haven’t thought of?  Feel free to post this poll on Twitter and Facebook so we get all sorts of feedback.  My disclaimer is, of course, that ultimately this decision is up to us – but we’ll strongly consider reader feedback when making our decision.  Thanks!