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If you stop by Sustain LA in early 2020, you’ll find a wide selection of eco-friendly, sustainable home and personal care products. Waxed food wrappers, organic wool dryer balls, bamboo toothbrushes, vegan floss—everything you need to finally end your toxic relationship with single-use plastic. Better late than never, right?
The cozy boutique Highland Park specializes in goods that actually decompose in landfills (unlike most of the things we buy). Don’t feel guilty if you don’t go with all your trash in one can. The goal here is not to get people to throw things away, but to help us reduce the amount of waste we produce. This task is as important now as it was before COVID-19. But living without waste has suffered a major setback as the pandemic bans bringing your own bags to the grocery store and double bags for takeout.
Although single-use plastics are not necessarily safer than reusable alternatives, many consumers concerned about the spread of disease are using them again. (We exclude disposable personal protective equipment such as masks and face shields.) Last summer, some US households generated 50% more waste than before the COVID-19 outbreak.
Will America’s revived love of plastic be a short-term romance or a long-term marriage? Time will show. In the meantime, zero waste stores are still trying to help us kick the plastic habit.
Sustain LA founder Leslie Campbell can’t predict the future, but she knows her store’s inventory has changed dramatically over the year.
The store still sells bamboo utensils and stainless steel straws, but “those sales have gone down quite quickly,” Campbell said. “Hand sanitizer, laundry detergent and hand sanitizer, there are a lot of sales now.”
To accommodate this change, Campbell, like many other organic store owners, had to adapt their business model in record time.
Prior to the pandemic, Sustain LA offered an in-store gas station where customers could bring in reusable containers (or buy locally) and restock on environmentally friendly cleaners, soaps, shampoos and lotions. They can also buy reusable or biodegradable personal items such as straws and toothbrushes. Sustain LA also rents out glassware, beverage dispensers, crockery and cutlery to help customers reduce event waste.
”With the lease, we’ve had a busy spring and summer wedding season and all of our couples have canceled or changed plans,” Campbell said.
Although in-store shopping was put on hold when Los Angeles County issued its first stay-at-home order in mid-March, Sustain LA was allowed to remain open because it sells essentials such as soap and laundry detergent.
“We were lucky. We spent several days ordering over the phone, photographing the entire range and creating an online store,” she said.
Campbell installed a touchless pickup system in the store’s parking lot, delivering items such as soap and shampoo in reusable glass containers that customers can return for a deposit. Her team has expanded delivery services and reduced shipping costs. They worked with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, and by August, customers were granted permission to bring clean Campbell containers back into the store for disinfection and refilling.
The front of the store has gone from a delightful range of organic products to a crowded warehouse. Campbell and her eight-person staff bring in additional non-waste products based on customer requests. Topping the list are cat toys made from catnip and fleece. Even cats can get bored in quarantine.
“We’ve made some small improvements along the way,” Campbell said. Rent for micro-events began to rise during the summer and fall, but remained stagnant after new accommodation orders were issued in November. As of December 21, Sustain LA is still open for in-store restocking and customer service, but only for two customers at a time. They also continue to offer contactless and outdoor delivery services. And the clients keep coming.
Outside of the pandemic, since Sustain LA opened in 2009, Campbell’s main goal has been to make it easier for people to get rid of plastic, but it hasn’t been easy.
In 2018, the US generated about 292.4 million tons of municipal solid waste, or 4.9 pounds per person per day. In the past few years, the level of recycling in our country has fluctuated at the level of 35%. In comparison, the recycling rate in Germany is around 68%.
“As a country, we’re pretty bad at recycling,” said Darby Hoover, senior resource officer at the National Resource Defense Council. “We’re just not doing well.”
While some restrictions have been lifted – California grocery stores have returned to using reusable bags, even if you have to use them to pack your own groceries – plastic waste production is on the rise across the country. The pro-plastic lobby is exploiting the pandemic and its concerns about hygiene measures to counter pre-COVID-19 plastic bans.
Before Covid-19, the fight against plastic in the US was booming, with state after state banning single-use items like plastic grocery bags. Over the past decade, zero waste stores have sprung up in major cities around the world, including New York, Vancouver, London, and Los Angeles.
The success of a Zero Waste store depends entirely on the consumer. Many manufacturers never cared about wasteful, unnecessary packaging—and still don’t.
At the turn of the twentieth century, clerk-run grocery stores were the norm before markets became “super”. When you enter these stores, you hand over your shopping list and the clerk collects everything for you, weighing items such as sugar and flour from baskets.
”Back then, if you wanted a 25-pound bag of sugar, you didn’t care who sold it, you only cared about the best price,” said John Stanton, professor of food marketing at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
Everything changed in 1916 when Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly Market in Memphis, Tennessee. To reduce operating costs, he fired store staff and created a self-service grocery model. Customers can pick up a shopping cart and select prepackaged products from neat shelves. Buyers do not have to wait for sellers, which saves time.
“Packaging is like a salesperson,” Stanton said. Now that clerks no longer collect goods for people, products must grab the attention of shoppers by turning them into tiny billboards. “Companies need to show why you should buy our sugar and not other brands,” he said.
Ad-matched packaging existed before self-service grocery stores, but when Saunders introduced Piggly Wiggly, companies stepped up their efforts to make their packaging stand out. Stanton cites cookies as an example. A simple cookie now needs two layers of packaging: one to keep it waiting for you and one to advertise itself.
World War II forced manufacturers to improve their packaging. Public historian and graphic designer Corey Bernath explains that during the war, the federal government pushed manufacturers to produce durable foods that could be shipped to soldiers in large quantities. After the war, these companies continued to manufacture these products and repackaged them for the civilian market.
“It’s good for business, they are ready to produce this material. You just resell and repackage it, and voila, you have light cheese and a TV dinner,” Burnett said.
Food manufacturers are focusing on integration and efficiency. Lightweight and durable plastic helps them achieve these goals. Bernat points to a comparison between glass and plastic bottles from the 1960s and 1970s. Before the advent of plastic, the market encouraged customers to return glass bottles and pay a deposit so manufacturers could reuse them. It takes time and resources, which is why bottlers have turned to plastic, which doesn’t break like glass and is lighter. Consumers in the mid-twentieth century loved plastic. They are the reality of science fiction, a sign of the effectiveness and modernity of missiles.
“After the war, people thought canned food was more hygienic than fresh or frozen food. At the time, people associated freshness and hygiene with packaging,” Burnett said. Supermarkets are starting to package food in plastic to compete with recycled products.
Businesses encourage the consumption of plastic. “We used to reuse things, but companies have changed that. Everything disposable is for you and you can just throw it away without thinking about it,” Burnett said.
”There are very few regulations that make manufacturers liable for the end of life of their products,” said Sustain LA’s Campbell.
In the United States, municipalities have a greater responsibility for developing and funding their recycling programs. Part of this money comes from taxpayers, part from the sale of recycled materials.
While the vast majority of Americans have access to some sort of recycling program, whether it’s curbside scrapping, drop-off, or a combination of both, most of us make a lot of “wish bikes.” If we think it can be recycled, we throw it in the blue bin.
Unfortunately, recycling is not that easy. Plastic grocery bags, while technically recyclable, prevent recycling equipment from doing their job. Takeout containers and greasy pizza boxes are often too contaminated with food leftovers to be recycled.
Manufacturers do not guarantee that the packaging they produce is recyclable, Hoover said. Take, for example, a box of juice. Hoover notes that it is usually made from a mixture of paper, aluminum, plastic and glue. Theoretically, most of this material can be recycled. “But it’s actually a recycling nightmare,” Hoover said.
Products made from various composite materials are difficult to process on a large scale. Even if you have items made from the same type of plastic, such as soda bottles and yogurt containers, they often cannot be recycled together.
“Bottles can be injection molded and yogurt containers can be injection molded, which will change their melting point,” Hoover said.
To complicate matters further, China, which once recycled about half of the world’s recyclable waste, no longer accepts much of our country’s waste. In 2017, China announced the introduction of a limit on the amount of garbage taken out. In January 2018, China banned the import of many types of plastic and paper, and recycled materials must meet strict pollution standards.
”We don’t have that low pollution levels in our system,” Hoover said. “Because the average American’s recyclables go in one big bin, the precious paper that sits next to those greasy takeaway boxes is often exposed to fire. It’s hard to meet those standards.”
Instead, recyclables that were once sent to China will be sent to landfill, stored in storage facilities, or sent to other countries (probably Southeast Asia). Even some of these countries, such as Malaysia, are fed up with the environmental consequences of endless waste and are starting to say no. As we upgrade our domestic recycling infrastructure in response to China’s ban, we are faced with the question: how can we stop creating so much waste?
Campbell and her family have been living a zero-waste lifestyle for ten years. It’s easy to get rid of low-hanging, single-use plastic fruits like shopping bags, water bottles and takeout containers, she says. The challenge is to replace household items such as laundry detergent, shampoo and deodorant in durable plastic containers.
“The jug itself is still a very useful and durable container. It just doesn’t make sense to throw it away so often,” she said. Sustain LA was born.
Campbell notes that reuse is critical to zero waste. Plastic laundry detergent jars may not be as Instagram-worthy as fancy glass containers, but by reusing and refilling this giant behemoth, you can keep it safe from the waste stream. Even with this step-by-step recycling approach, you can still prevent single-use items from ending up in the landfill.
Daniel Riley of Riley’s General Store, which doesn’t have a brick and mortar store but offers delivery in the San Gabriel Valley, understands the importance of moving to zero waste.
“We live a very busy life and we don’t have to put our rubbish in a glass jar at the end of the year. Companies should be held accountable for making durable packaging,” Riley said.
Until then, it will focus on refills for sustainable home and personal care products.
“My goal is to provide affordable supplements and approach it with a common sense approach to provide products that people in my area really need,” she said.
For Riley’s General Store, which celebrated its first anniversary in November, the lockdown in March boosted customer demand, especially for laundry detergent and soap.
“It was a success because my deliveries are already contactless,” Riley said, adding that she currently does not charge for delivery.
Post time: Aug-03-2023