Category Archives: zero waste

Our pantry (it feels weird to post a picture of our kitchen shelves)

Our zero-waste effort suffered some setbacks when I was injured. In general I’d argue that once it’s established, zero waste doesn’t require additional effort or time, and it’s certainly cheaper. The transition is a hassle—so if I were going to do it again I’d do it on a replacement basis, where when we ran out of one thing, we replaced it with a less wasteful alternative—but whatever weird stuff you do, once it’s familiar, acquires the easy grace of any other habit.

But Matt didn’t have the same shopping habits and haunts that I did when I was incapacitated. There was a lot of takeout, and although takeout pizza boxes are compostable, even our kids won’t eat pizza forever. Moreover, the in-home physical therapist who came to work with me twice a week brought a collection of disposable medical supplies (gloves, bandages, thermometer covers). And we certainly weren’t going to turn down any of the gifts of food or anything else people brought us, no matter how they were packaged. We were just grateful to have them.

Our fridge (the empty shelf usually holds lunchbags)

Now that I’m more of an independent person again, I’ve been slowly rebuilding the zero waste muscles along with the ones in my leg. Despite the setbacks, though there were two big gains. The first is that our daughter changed preschools to a Japanese immersion program. Although this preschool is crazy with the art projects (and with music and dance; it is totally awesome), unlike the old preschool they eschew stuff like foam stickers and stick primarily with recyclable materials. There is an occasional plastic bead necklace, but overall our weekly landfill haul no longer has a lot of art piling up.

The local deli is delighted to use our containers for hummus, crackers and cheese. All we had to do was ask.

The second is that I discovered there is a way to recycle a limited amount of soft plastics in San Francisco. I have mixed feelings about plastics “recycling.” Even though I know better, it is easy to grow complacent about the fact that we can chuck a fair bit of plastic into the recycling bin. I know full well that it’s not really being recycled, but there are days when I’d prefer not to think about that. On the other hand, there are some things, like my contact lens solution bottles, for which there are no easy substitutes. I’m pretty sure that it’s better to down-cycle those plastic bottles into fleece than to throw them into a landfill. I try to be mindful and not go nuts with it.

In hindsight it astonishes me that we once used plastic bags at the farmers’ market. They give hefty (unannounced) discounts if you bring your own bags.

So anyway, Cole Hardware in San Francisco recycles a small amount of soft plastics for members of their buyer club (free, and worth joining for the great coupons, which I used to build up our collection of pantry jars). There are restrictions in terms of amount and condition. Bags must be clean and free of food waste—otherwise they’d attract vermin—and you can only bring one small bagful per visit. I called and asked them about it, and they are sending them to the one place I’ve ever heard of that turns plastic bags into more plastic bags. That is an interesting business. Recycled plastic bags, despite being a more sustainable alternative than virgin plastic bags, are not very popular. Thanks to the many colors of bags that are sent for recycling, the end product is always a brown or grey plastic. Unfortunately people and businesses who buy plastic bags typically like them to be clear or white. Recycling is often one of those business concepts for which there is more supply than demand.

Weird bulk stuff (miso, tahini, almond butter) is where Rainbow Grocery really shines. Nearby are things like bulk honey, vinegar and fresh pasta.

I am no fan of soft plastics, but I’m glad that they’re doing this. We occasionally get packages wrapped in plastic, or buy something with a surprise plastic wrapper inside a paper or glass container, and being able to save those for our next visit to the hardware store feels better than just tossing them.

This is the bulk section at one of our local grocery stores. I had never really noticed it before this year.

At this point we have gotten most of the easy stuff under control. We shop in the bulk section with reusable grocery bags and jars and get most of our produce sticker-free at the farmers’ market. We compost what we can, recycle what we can, and with the help of the Cole Hardware soft plastics recycling program, have shrunk our landfill waste to whatever mystery-material junk our kids pick up at school or off the sidewalk, plus a few synthetic rubber bands. Food-related waste, it turns out, is pretty simple, and our kitchen has never been more uncluttered. Don’t buy takeout or processed foods, and when in doubt, have a salad. We put a pot of (bulk) beans in the oven every Saturday morning, throw every leftover vegetable in the fridge into a soup on Sunday night, and divide them both out over the week’s dinners. That right there is the reason zero waste is the world’s most effective diet, and also why it can be done on less money than a California family can get in food stamps. Unfortunately people who really live on food stamps rarely have the kinds of shopping options or resources to store fresh foods that we do. But given that we do, it seems ungracious not to use them.

This is part of Rainbow Grocery’s bulk bath and body section, which definitely makes life easier.

From that point things get harder, even though we buy used when we can. The bathroom is a thorn in my side. We buy soaps and shampoo and conditioner in bulk, but our kids come home with band-aids and we’re still tossing non-compostable dental floss. (I tried to buy a carton of compostable silk floss and got sent a carton of non-compostable non-silk floss. When I complained, the seller refunded our money and told us to keep the carton as an apology. So we are working our way through it.) There are recyclable and compostable toothbrushes and we use those. Tom’s of Maine will recycle their empty toothpaste tubes if you send them back, so we do that too. But there are still dribs and drabs of stuff that trickle through. We are at the point where we’d have to put in a lot more effort for incremental gains, and I wonder whether that is the best use of our time.

Lots of things are available in bulk, once you start looking for them.

The fundamental problem is that we live in a society where waste is the default option. It requires a certain mental effort and thoughtfulness to push through that. When I do there’s usually a lower-cost and lower-effort option, which makes sense. (That could be said of many things, another obvious one being the ostensible point of this blog, which is technically about alternative transportation. But once down that rabbit hole one tends to drift a bit into other counter-cultural stuff–although not yet to Burning Man!) Waste is presented as the default option because it’s a way to sell more stuff. But we don’t have to play along.

One of Matt’s lunches: green onion pancakes, beans, orange

I have mentioned, off and on, that in the wake of my visit to the dump we have been attempting to move our household toward zero waste. Apparently, like the biking, this is now a happening thing. (Since when am I tuned into the zeitgeist?) The City and County of San Francisco has the same zero waste goal, scheduled for 2020.

People approach zero waste in different ways. The easiest definition of zero-waste is to send nothing into the landfill. There is sometimes an assumption that substituting recyclable packaging is fine. I didn’t make that assumption. Evidently I like to make things difficult for myself.

This is a pretty typical haul from the cheese shop: hummus, salad cheese, crackers.

I’ve since learned that we started somewhat ahead of the average American household. We swapped paper towels out for rags long ago and have always used cloth napkins and reusable lunch containers. But we now shop exclusively with cloth bags and our own glass jars, and we have become the kind of people who bring our own tableware to restaurants that use disposables. None of these changes was especially difficult, although it felt weird to do something different at first.

I go to the cafeteria once every two weeks, but my plate is recognized nonetheless.

Zero waste efforts make you instantly recognizable. When I walk into the office cafeteria with my china plate, the sandwich guy immediately starts heating up falafel. When I go by the local cheese shop, the owner waves (“Look, it’s the woman who brings her own beeswax wrappers! On a bike!”) It can feel a little like the over-examined life. Mostly it’s good, though.

Sending as little as possible to the landfill (in San Francisco, the black bin) is a given in a zero waste household. Here in San Francisco, that means all soft plastics are basically out. Although Recology will take rigid plastics in the recycling bin, virtually all “recycled” rigid plastics are down-cycled—they get one more use as lumber or fleece then go directly to the landfill. So we don’t buy those either.

This was a week of landfill-bound waste last month, but it’s dropped since then.

Our progress on landfill-bound waste has been pretty dramatic; most weeks, it easily fits into one of the old quart-sized Ziploc bags I keep finding around the house even now. Most of what’s left is preschool foam sticker art (which is being very slowly phased out at our request) and medical waste (e.g. bandages the kids come home with, and my new waste-nemesis, dental floss).

Sustainable preschool art is a continuing battle.

After my visit to Recology, I also viewed recycling (the blue bin) as a last-resort option. Recycling is energy-intensive at best and involves massive transportation costs because most recycling on the west coast is sent to China. And although paper can be recycled a few times, it degrades to a lower quality product each time–printer paper to paper bags to toilet paper– then it goes to the landfill too. Glass and metal are really recycled, but expensive to melt and reform. But when there appear to be no other alternatives, glass, metal, and low-quality compostable paper are the types of packaging we choose.

Minimizing our recycling has been very hard. We both have office jobs, our kids come home with papers from school, and junk mail is horribly persistent. However we are definitely producing less: on a good week our recycling barely covers the bottom of the blue bin.

Happily, composting (the green bin) is universally acclaimed.  San Francisco has municipal compost pickup so we were already keeping food waste separated, but we started including odds and ends we hadn’t previously realized we could compost (e.g. hair, dryer lint, floor sweepings, waxed-paper butter wrappers). Food-soiled paper is compostable as well. We’re not yet at the point that I begrudge an occasional pizza box.

This is part of the “jar” section of Rainbow Grocery’s bulk zone: miso, tahini, nut butters, salsa.

However we don’t buy processed food because virtually none of it can be bought in bulk (this is evidently a quick way to lose weight). I find myself getting irritable when manufacturers expect me to take responsibility for dealing with their packaging or things they make that break. I wonder now why I once accepted the responsibility for disposing of whatever a retailer chose to throw at me. And it seems crazy, after only a few months, to buy something in a container that is used only once, to carry an item from one place to another, after which the container is put in a landfill until roughly the end of time. It is something I had never considered before this year, and now it seems like madness.

I’ll say this, though: our fridge looks awesome.

Overall we’re getting pretty crunchy over here, which honestly has never been a personal aspiration. The homesteading, back-to-the-land ethos of traditional hippies appeals to an urbanist like me about as much as firewalking. So I have been surprised at the response of people when they see me shopping, which is largely fascination. I’m frequently quizzed: “How do you store greens?” (Answer: in a glass jar in the fridge, they keep for over a week that way. Berries, too.) The idea of reducing waste seems universally appealing. I’m not really sure why.

This is not something we can do all at once. The bathroom is still challenging—contact lens solution, toothbrushes, toothpaste, dental floss. Matt and the kids pick up a lot of disposable packaging when they go out solo. There is a lot of meal planning. It’s a change, and change can be hard. Even so I feel no urge to go back to the way we were.