Zero Waste at Trader Joes

[auroramagiceyes]

I could have called the title Mission Impossible...


Thursday I went to a zero waste business forum over at the Santa Rosa city hall. We've all heard the numbers before but now the discussion is what we can change as citizens and as a community in our behaviors that can promote zero waste both in upstream production of items and in our behaviors as consumers and business owners to promote the new goals for over all reduction of landfill items.

So as a personal experiment I decided to try shopping for items without buying anything plastic since plastic tends to have the worst upstream effects on the environment while at Trader Joe's..... The result.... I got a carton of eggs, some milk and butter.....

Talk about personal torture there are so many items my inner foodie wanted but with just one micro constraint they went off the list.....Even in the vegetable aisle plastic cartons for artichokes plastic containers to hold herbs, plastic for every salad mix, going in I thought this would be an easy adjustment it's Trader Joe's they speak to the progressive community.... I wanted to make the pizza I had three weeks ago and until I realized the dough are held in plastic bags I was game on..... But in many regards its not the merchant's fault plastic is the standard for delivering products. This begs the question what could be the alternatives for package materials if plastic was off the table?

[leela8]

I am so with you on all this...there is so much completely unnecessary
plastic and/or waste available at TJs and everywhere....but it brings up something I've been thinking about for a long time, that could raise peoples' hackles since it doesn't jibe 100% with the currently pc point of view, and it is this:

Why not focus on "a whole lot less" waste, or "a much smaller footprint",
rather than try to tackle the impossible task of having no impact whatsoever on the environment?

It seems like the very laws of nature/physics show us that to exist causes impact, causes waste, potentially causes as much harm as good.There is no getting around the reality that for every action there is a consequence.
You cannot hope to exist without eating something alive, burning energy to consume it, pooping it out. It seems to me it would be better for the psyche and for the cause itself to attempt the very realistic (and therefore less Sisyphean) goal of minimizing our impact in any given area, with a focus on improving and honing our relationship with the earth and nature,
and finding a balance that makes sense.

You cannot consume anything (food, space, information) without using up or displacing something, without creating a waste product, and without generating a whole array of consequences. But you can make the choices akin to those described in the above post, to a degree that makes sense (for if the pizza dough was sold in glass containers, what about the added shipping and fuel impact? The cleaning and recycling impact? The manufacturing impact of glass?)

There exists no perfect, impact-free solution because the laws of nature don't work that way. The fact that awareness is now reaching a level where more and more people are willing to think about their impact on the earth and willing to reconsider their relationship and responsibility to it (which can be mutual and joyful!) seems like a great point to focus on.

Where plastic is often completely unnecessary and totally wasteful,
it is in other applications most wonderful. What if we redefined where and when we really needed things like plastic or electric light etc, and instead of demonizing things, or ourselves, considered honestly what we really needed or didn't?

Clearly an attempt to shed light and educate on the impact of our actions or habits is the best basis for creating change. Expecting impossible results rather undermines the effort, in my opinion.

All this to say it is a step by step journey to get ourselves to see who we are, where we are, what we're doing, and why. A lot of what was unconscious ten or fifteen years ago for many, has now come into awareness. This is good let's not be too hard on ourselves and instead,
be happy that we are slowly making our collective way to a clearer vision
of the Great Living Entity of which we are all a part.

[auroramagiceyes]

Well I guess the simple answer is my friends and family went out and had kids so everyday via facebook or bbq's or picnic's or just get together's I get to see and run around with and be aunt horse-ie to these future guardians of our planet and well to be honest my behaviors today right now are creating the future they get to live in.......

I don't get the benefit of rose colored glasses anymore because making a effort to "try" to do better means leaving these kids a planet lacking in the bio diversity I got to enjoy during my childhood and well that truth does not sit well with me.

There are less bee's today then when I was a child and guess what I am part of that problem.

The oceans are struggling to process the things I consumed and discarded. As a result of this there are total dead zones in the seas where nothing can survive because of what my behaviors left in them. The tide pools I enjoyed as a child are struggling to survive in the current conditions that exist.

We live in paradise I realize that but in my own lifetime parts of that paradise have been changed dramatically (the open fields and meadows and hillside that are now fountain grove).

Yesterday my friend's 5 year old came to the discovery that he doesn't want to eat animals because he loves his pets and why can we have some for friends and eat others. Yeah I feel like a total jerk when faced with that truth, ya know what I got nothing, its wrong to eat animals cause well yep it just is.

And ya know what its wrong to throw things away that will never bio-degrade too.

[decterlove]

So as a personal experiment I decided to try shopping for items without buying anything plastic since plastic tends to have the worst upstream effects on the environment while at Trader Joe's..... The result.... I got a carton of eggs, some milk and butter.....

I think all these efforts are fine and certainly should be incorporated into our own personal lifestyles as much as possible but I also suspect that at least in regard to landfill we are going to have technologies at our disposal in a decade or two (nanotechnologies, specialized bacteria like we already have now that feed on oil spills, etc) that will be able to "digest" all this plastic crap we have to bury at the moment. The floating continents of it in the Pacific are more troubling but ultimately at least for now, my fear rests more in the direction of irreversible damage caused by nuclear war or gmos. Not a tech person...just a layman's humble opinion.....

[someguy]

I am so with you on all this...there is so much completely unnecessary
plastic and/or waste available at TJs and everywhere....but it brings up something I've been thinking about for a long time, that could raise peoples' hackles since it doesn't jibe 100% with the currently pc point of view, and it is this:

Why not focus on "a whole lot less" waste, or "a much smaller footprint",
rather than try to tackle the impossible task of having no impact whatsoever on the environment?

It seems like the very laws of nature/physics show us that to exist causes impact, causes waste, potentially causes as much harm as good.There is no getting around the reality that for every action there is a consequence.
You cannot hope to exist without eating something alive, burning energy to consume it, pooping it out. It seems to me it would be better for the psyche and for the cause itself to attempt the very realistic (and therefore less Sisyphean) goal of minimizing our impact in any given area, with a focus on improving and honing our relationship with the earth and nature,
and finding a balance that makes sense.

You cannot consume anything (food, space, information) without using up or displacing something, without creating a waste product, and without generating a whole array of consequences. But you can make the choices akin to those described in the above post, to a degree that makes sense (for if the pizza dough was sold in glass containers, what about the added shipping and fuel impact? The cleaning and recycling impact? The manufacturing impact of glass?)

There exists no perfect, impact-free solution because the laws of nature don't work that way. The fact that awareness is now reaching a level where more and more people are willing to think about their impact on the earth and willing to reconsider their relationship and responsibility to it (which can be mutual and joyful!) seems like a great point to focus on.

Where plastic is often completely unnecessary and totally wasteful,
it is in other applications most wonderful. What if we redefined where and when we really needed things like plastic or electric light etc, and instead of demonizing things, or ourselves, considered honestly what we really needed or didn't?

Clearly an attempt to shed light and educate on the impact of our actions or habits is the best basis for creating change. Expecting impossible results rather undermines the effort, in my opinion.

All this to say it is a step by step journey to get ourselves to see who we are, where we are, what we're doing, and why. A lot of what was unconscious ten or fifteen years ago for many, has now come into awareness. This is good let's not be too hard on ourselves and instead,
be happy that we are slowly making our collective way to a clearer vision
of the Great Living Entity of which we are all a part.

What a beautiful post. So thoughtful and full of critical thinking. Thanks for the refreshing point of view.