Welcome to Losing Waste
An East Bay Natural Grocers, Inc. Initiative
We believe in a world where nothing is wasted; not our time, our energy, our food, not our health nor our creativity, and definitely not our one true home.
We’re going on a plastics and disposables diet to lose waste and address our climate crisis. We urge you to join us.
Our Focus:
4 High Impact Areas Where We Can Do the Most Good
As retailers in the natural foods space, we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to influence and broker change.
We have a platform where we can help improve consumer knowledge around waste and its solutions.
We’ve been pioneers in the grocery industry for a long time, and pulling from our years of experience we’ve chosen four interconnected areas that, when addressed together, can have a massive impact to our environmental sustainability and stewardship goals for our community.
Food
Food is an essential, integral, and sacred part of our lives. It always has been. It’s part of our future too.
Packaging
We’re ready to start reducing the number of single-use plastics and other disposable products in your life for a healthier world and a healthier you.
Resources
It all takes resources. Resources to grow, resources to manage, resources to care for, resources to reassess. We need to use and respect accordingly
Civics
We can only do so much. While what we do helps, big systemic, change is needed to get us where we have to be.
The Covid-19 Pandemic obviously disrupted so many of our plans and intentions particularly around reusables which have been highly restricted. That, and our energies had to go elsewhere. As things normalize, we look forward to renewing solutions to our societal waste issues.
Our 2020 Bag Ordinance
“How Many Reusables Can We Credit You?”
Back in the day, “Paper or plastic?” was actually a thing we used to ask you at checkout. That’s how it was everywhere, but thankfully it’s not the case anymore. However, that change which seems so sensical today, didn’t catch on throughout the entire shopping process.
We still need to drastically cut the amount of waste in the world. So, we’re taking aim at our store’s largest source of plastic waste; plastic bulk and produce bags. This time we decided we’re not going to wait for legislation and public standards to come around. They eventually will, but we have to start now.
Like the previous plastic checkout bag ban, we’re taking a similar approach. The big thing you should know about is we will be implementing a .10 charge on January, 2nd March 2020 for all new pre-checkout bags used from our store. Granted, this isn’t just about reducing plastic waste; it’s also a shift into adopting reusables.