Guest Essay: "Green" Your Farmers' Market Routine

The following essay by Jacqui Stork, assistant manager of the Hillsdale Farmers' Market, is full of helpful tips for making your farmers' market shopping more earth-friendly. (Hint: These tips also work for shopping at the grocery store!)

We farmers' market people tend to care a lot about the earth, and our impact on it. As such, we work hard to have a net positive impact in our actions and approach to food and always seek to pass that along to our customers. That being said, there are times when the drive for quality and convenience means that we use plastics or other disposable products. Because we want to balance our desire to be more green with the realities of running a public market, we thought we'd share six super simple ways you (the customer) can help green up the market every time you shop.

Reusable bags are the best!

Remember Your Market Bag(s)
This one is probably the lowest hanging fruit—most of us have a least one reusable bag hanging around at home. Keep it somewhere that you'll remember to bring it with you. If you forget, or just want to sport a new look, most markets have heavy-duty bags available at the information booth. They can hold a pretty hefty market haul and are machine washable. If you are doing an especially heavy shop, consider bringing a wagon (some markets provide wagons) to pack it in and out!

Decline the Plastic Bag
Along these same lines, you will likely be offered smaller plastic bags for produce at market stalls—you can always decline to take one. Just use your market tote as a carryall for the day's purchases. If you like to keep your items separated (or simply need to corral smaller items, like tomatoes) consider purchasing cotton or mesh produce bags.

Look for the recycling station.

Recycle the Right Way
One of the biggest challenges we face at the market is making sure that our recycling is "clean." We often find that things have been tossed into the recycling bins that we end up having to trash. The biggest culprits? Coffee cups, bottle caps, plastic straws and containers with food refuse on it. When these get mixed in with the recycling, our volunteers have to hand-sort and remove them (which is no fun at the end of a long day). If you aren't sure whether or not something is recyclable, ask before tossing it in.

Prioritize Plants
Eating a plant-based diet is one of the best things we can do for the environment. This doesn't have to mean eschewing meat and other animal products entirely—it can simply mean shifting your focus to prioritizing foods like vegetables, legumes and fruits. Stock up on fresh, seasonal items that fit this bill and use recipes that make these items the star.

A wagon can come in handy!

Rethink Scraps
A lot of the time we don't know what to do with those "extra" bits (like mushroom stems, corn cobs and onion peels). Try keeping a zip-top bag or airtight container in your freezer to fill with scraps for making stock. Once you get a full bag or two, dump the contents into a large soup pot and cover with about a quart of water. Add salt, pepper, bay leaves and any other aromatics you have on hand and let simmer for one to two hours to create a light broth to use in soups or other cooking projects.

Practice Durable Dining
If you plan on eating or drinking at the market, consider bringing (some) of your own dishes. While our hot food vendors can't fill your personal tupperware, you can use silverware you bring from home to eat your meal. (Anybody else love those camping sporks?) You can also bring your travel coffee mug to be filled at some coffee vendors' stands, and carry a reusable water bottle to hydrate at the info booth.

Small steps can make a big difference when we all practice—try some of the tips above to help us help the planet!

Photo of recycling station from Portland Farmers Market.

Green Tips for Holiday Recycling

My friends Christine and Mike at Green Dog Pet Supply, purveyors of environmentally friendly pet supplies and gifts in the Beaumont neighborhood of Northeast Portland, recently shared the following information on their blog. Some of it was news to me, so I'm hoping you'll be able to make use of these handy holiday tips, too!

Portland allows us to recycle a lot of things at curbside, including plastic plant nursery pots, empty spray oil cans, motor oil (next to bins in a clear milk jug) and food waste. In fact, in five years of curbside composting, the city has been able to turn food waste into over 400,000 tons of finished compost, which is enough compost to cover 2,400 acres of farmland, about 4 square miles. That alone is a lot of volume kept out of our landfills!

Unfortunately, it’s easy to contaminate our curbside recycling bins with well-intentioned attempts to recycle things we wish they would take, or with little things that we don’t realize can ruin the ability to recycle the rest of the material.

For example, lids are almost always made of a different plastic than the bottle or tub they’re sold with. It’s too work-intensive for workers to remove them—recyclers have too few people, too much recycling to pick through quickly, and everything still needs to get washed and processed or packed up to be processed elsewhere. Since the plastic in the lid is a very different plastic, with a higher melting point than bottles, they need to be processed an entirely different way.

Plastic bags and caps can also jam machinery when they get into the mix accidentally, which can cause damage and increases the likelihood that recyclers will toss “contaminated” recycling instead of sorting through it. A light bulb might be made of glass, but their different melting points and chemical compositions will ruin new glass bottles. If a buyer of glass sees a light bulb at the top of a load, the entire load could be rejected for recycling. This can mean that all of our good intentions are foiled, so when in doubt, leave it out!

Here’s a list of some common things that are mistakenly added to recycling, but could in fact be recycled elsewhere:

• Soft plastic bags can’t go into your curbside recycling bin, but can be recycled at both Whole Foods and New Seasons (just not hard and crinkly bags like chip bags—those need go in the trash).
• Plastic “clamshell” containers like spinach or to-go boxes can’t be recycled curbside, but can be recycled at both New Seasons and Whole Foods, as well as plastic things like yogurt/deli lids and coffee lids. (The coffee cups need to go in the garbage, because they contain waterproofing additives).
• Any paper made to contain frozen foods or takeout containers must go in the garbage. It also contains additives to make them waterproof and these additives make it non-recyclable.
• Any paper with decorative foil has to go in the garbage (though all other wrapping paper, tissue paper, cards and envelopes can go in, minus the ribbons). When it's time to unwrap gifts, you can set up two collection bags ahead of time, one for wrapping paper, tissue and cards, and the other for ribbons and foil. It can be fun for kids to be in charge of things, so have one little elf in charge of bringing presents to people to unwrap, and another little elf in charge of grabbing that wrapping paper and getting it into the right bag. You’ll be amazed at how much tidier the living room looks after present opening! And don’t forget: Those foil-covered papers and ribbons are great for kids’ craft projects.
• Packaging peanuts and styrofoam cannot go in your curbside bin, but check for places will reuse them. The UPS and Fedex stores are often happy to take your clean, bagged styrofoam peanuts—call your local store and ask. Excess cardboard boxes and packing peanuts can be posted on Craigslist or Next Door. People who are moving might appreciate them, or small businesses in the neighborhood might be able to use them for shipping and might even come take them off your hands!
• Styrofoam blocks are a challenge at the time of this writing. Check out this link for your options.
• When you take a toy out of a formed plastic insert, take it to Whole Foods. They have a bin labeled “non-curbside plastic” which is good for caps, lids and other misc hard plastics.
• Corks can’t go in curbside, but Whole Foods has a natural cork recycling bin inside the store. Just make sure it's natural cork, not a plastic cork.

More information on interesting things from your holiday dinners that you can include in the compost bin, plus resource links and helpful suggestions to reduce the amount of waste your household produces.