“Zero waste” on the farm

(CSA Newsletter: Week 9)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

The local news about the landfill’s proposed expansion has inspired a conversation here at the farm about reducing our farm’s waste — perhaps even achieving ‘zero waste.’ If it isn’t crystal clear from the term itself, ‘zero waste’ is a philosophy and movement that aims to eliminate the need for landfills by eliminating trash: on a large scale through systems development (recycling, composting, etc.) and product design (eliminating packaging, etc.), and on a small scale through highly educated and informed individuals.

As far as waste goes, we’re already fairly conservative — our farm and home combined produce less than a small can of garbage each week. But we know we can do better.

Ever since living for a year in a remote mountain community, we have been highly aware of the materials involved in daily life — specifically where they go when we’re done with them. The community we lived in, Holden Village, was located fifty miles up Lake Chelan, and every single waste item had to be dealt with by community members and then shipped downlake on an expensive barge to be sent to the recycling center or landfill.

The magnitude of the project inspired a deep dedication to reducing the total waste produced, period. All food scraps were composted, including cooked foods. Paper products were burned in a small high efficiency, low output incinerator. Parents were encouraged to use the community’s cloth diaper service. Everything else was sorted carefully, both by individuals at the trashcan and again later by community members, to eliminate landfill waste as much as possible.

It’s amazing how personally handling your own garbage on a regular basis will inspire commitment to reduction. Not surprisingly, the community continually analyzed its purchasing decisions. In the kitchen, where I worked, we tried to make purchasing decisions based on packaging: Does this product come in minimal packaging? Is the packaging reusable, recyclable or compostable? For this reason, our favorite produce vendors to work with were local farmers who would send us vegetables in boxes that we carefully dissembled and sent back to be used again and again.

So, it’s not surprising that many years later we’re continuing to think about our own business and life in terms of waste reduction at every point. As I said earlier, we’re already fairly conservative. Unlike when we worked for other people, we’re now in a unique position to be aware of the details of both our own personal lives and our place of work. Overall, we’re pleased with how efficient we’ve managed to be in spite of the overwhelming madness of starting the farm (it’d be easy to let our ecological goals slip when trying to stay afloat and get a million things done every day), but we still see ways we can improve.

Our farm’s most obvious current weakness is … you guessed it: plastic bags. Up until now, using bags has been the easiest way for us to distribute loose bulk veggies. Plastic produce bags are easy to weigh into; they’re easy for you to pick up; and they are well suited to storing vegetables in your fridge without drying out.

Also, they’re ‘cheap.’ A case of 4,000 produce bags costs us around $74, or 1.85 cents per bag. In contrast, those ecologically friendly recycled (and recyclable) paper berry containers cost us 35-80 cents each, depending on the size. That’s up to 40 times more expensive!

However, I put the word ‘cheap’ in quotations intentionally. Even though the low cost has been an easy incentive to keep using them, it certainly doesn’t begin to cover the environmental costs of plastic bags. There are many hidden costs surrounding plastic bag production and disposal We’re at the point where we can no longer deny these big problems and are beginning to research alternatives: both alternative bag materials and alternative distribution methods.

Realistically, some items will always need to be distributed in a bag: salad mix, for example. Therefore, it’s worth looking for alternative bag materials. We’re only at the beginning stage of this research, but we have fairly tight requirements. If we’re going to spend the extra money, we want a product that meets our needs: can stand up to being wet (paper bags won’t work), can be re-used several times (we won’t re-use them, but we hope that you will at home), and can be composted in a low temperature home composting situation. Frankly, if a bag needs to be composted in a municipal composting facility, then it’s of little use to us in Yamhill County — and, when an organic material bag is added to a traditional landfill, it will breakdown anaerobically into methane, a greenhouse gas. That’s not an improvement!

We’ve seen a few options around: corn-based bags, other starch-based bags, true cellophane (wood pulp) bags, and something called ‘OxoBiodegradable’ plastic bags (still made out of plastic but supposedly quicker to biodegrade). Someone might suggest that we collect used produce bags and re-use, but we can’t legitimately distribute clean vegetables in used bags from various sources. Frankly, I don’t think a perfect solution exists yet, except to wean ourselves off of the bag habit altogether.

To that end, we’re hoping to reduce our need for bags at pick-up. Some CSAs we know about provide no bags at all, and instead put out scales for members to weigh their own vegetables into their own bags. While this is probably the most sustainable solution, it leans too far away from hospitality for us. We already ask you to come during a three-hour window every week to pick up your veggies, and so we strive to make that pick-up experience as convenient and pleasant as possible for you. We want you to arrive feeling cared and provided for. We also don’t want you to be slowed down by long lines at the scales. Your life is busy, and we want the CSA experience to be a joy (not a burden) in your weekly routine.

So, to try to compromise between extreme, we’re experimenting with other possible solutions. We’ve begun by building one prototype partitioned-bin that allows us to portion vegetables by weight. We’ve used that with good success for many items this winter such as onions and beets. Pick-up goes a little slower when CSA members have to handle many beets rather than just grab a bag, but so far it hasn’t seemed to be a problem. We’re planning to build more of these kinds of bins so that we can distribute more bulk items without bags.

But there is still the issue of the leafy greens, which would be damaged if we didn’t carefully weigh them straight into a sturdy bag. So, we’ll keep looking at our options and welcome feedback from anyone interested in doing a little research for fun. What is the most sustainable alternative bag material? Any other ideas? If you do start looking for options, please keep in mind our goals listed above and price. I think we can reasonably afford to spend up to 5 cents per bag, but we’ll consider higher prices too depending on the product.

In the meantime, there are many ways that you can be an immediate part of the solution. Although we can’t distribute produce in used produce bags, you are more than welcome to save your used produce bags and give them to us to fill for you at the pick-up. A few people have been doing so for years, and it works fine. Likewise, when you remember to bring your own carrying bags, we save plastic handle bags as well.

Perhaps there are other ways you can cut back on waste around your own house too. Hopefully our plastic bag quandary can serve as inspiration for others to think about how we as an evolving society can strive for the ultimate goal of zero waste. For more information about achieving zero waste on a municipal level visit www.zerowaste.org; and for stories about one family’s attempt to achieve zero waste on a household scale visit www.myzerowaste.com.

The good news is that the vegetables you eat this week will have ultimately created very, very little waste. Veggies in the store come in non-recyclable boxes that are rarely re-used and often create other kinds of waste in harvest, packing and transport. Your veggies come straight from the fields to you in re-used bins! Bask in that good news this week (along with the sun!). Enjoy the vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla