Coffee Cups: Bringing or borrowing a reusable coffee cup
Takeaway coffee cups are one of the most used single-use plastic items in the world. We offer a few options to carry your hot or cold beverages around with you: Klean Kanteen Sunset 16oz TKWide Insulated Bottles with Cafe Cap and Sea Spray 16oz Rise Tumblers—they look great and won’t spill coffee into your backpack, purse, or computer bag. Even if you get your reusable container from somewhere other than the Co-op, we’ll give you 15¢ off when you fill it with to-go coffee!
If you happen to forget to bring in your reusable container, you may feel better knowing that our coffee cups and lids are made with renewable resources; lined with PLA (a plant-based plastic), BPI-certified compostable; and meet ASTM D6868 standards for compostability.
Loose Produce: Find plastic free alternatives when buying fruit & veggies.
We offer many fruits and vegetables in bulk both to reduce plastic use and to give you flexibility in choosing how much you’d like. A bunch of bananas or a cabbage sit in your cart or basket well, but a pound of Brussels sprouts will roll all over the place, and leafy greens can get your other groceries wet—sometimes you need a produce bag. We offer plastic produce bags, but we also offer compostable single-use produce bags as well. They probably won’t biodegrade in your home composter, though—if you use a compost pick-up service, confirm that they can take Crown Poly Pull-N-Pak® 12 micron Green Compostable Produce Bags before including them in your bucket. We also offer reusable organic cotton mesh produce bags as an option if you didn’t bring a bag from home.
Unless you’re going to eat the produce you purchased right away or it can sit on your counter, you’ll need to store it. Check out our Plastic-Free Fruit & Vegetable Storage Guide (www.willystreet.coop/plastic-free-produce-storage-guide) for suggestions on how you can keep that produce without using plastic.
Meat & Seafood: Avoid the plastic trays used for meat and seafood items.
If you buy meat and seafood products, getting them from the service case (when possible) will decrease the amount of plastic used. The wrap the meat and seafood clerks use does contain plastic to help prevent leaks, but it’s designed to use less plastic than most wraps.
Reusable Shopping Bags: Bring your own and help reduce plastic waste.
Bringing your own shopping bags can reduce the use of paper bags at checkout. (We haven’t offered plastic bags at the register in decades.) We’ll also contribute 10¢ to the Double Dollars Fund for each paper shopping bag we don’t have to use because you brought your own! You can also bring back any reusable paper shopping bags and put them on the donation shelves near the front of the store—our food pantry partners can use those as well.
If you’d like to buy a reusable shopping bag, we have a number of options:
- ChicoBag Original Totes are light but durable, and crafted from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic bottles.
- Willy Street Co-op branded cotton canvas tote bags
Bulk Products: Buy from the Bulk department with your own sanitized containers when possible.
Products in our Bulk department tend to cost less than the packaged versions of those products, and you can buy as much or as little as you need. When you bring in your own sanitized containers to put the products in, you can also skip the single-use plastic!
Water Bottles: BYO reusable bottle instead of buying plastic ones.
Get a reusable water bottle and fill ’er up! We offer Klean Kanteen 27oz classic water bottles for sale. Many water fountains, including the ones we have at each store, have an option that makes it easy to fill up your water bottle. Although you may not want to lug around a whole gallon of water, we do have a reverse osmosis bulk water machine at each of our stores to fill up one-, three-, or five-gallon containers.
At the Bakery: Plan ahead & avoid pre-packed baked goods.
During COVID, we began wrapping all of our pastries in plastic, but we (and many customers) did not like so much single-use plastic being used. We reintroduced the bakery case with non-wrapped pastries at Willy East, and now you can get your Level 5 Donuts, Far Breton Bakery pastries, and Madison Sourdough croissants, danishes, and pain aux raisins sans plastic. We plan to bring back the bakery cases at Willy West and Willy North later this month.
The tissue paper we offer to choose pastries is made from recycled natural kraft paper using a chlorine-free manufacturing process, and it’s compostable. Our bakery bags are also BPI-certified compostable and produced without PFAS.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: The three R’s for a better planet – reduce, reuse, recycle.
Before you make a purchase, ask yourself 3 simple questions:
- Do I actually need this?
- Is there an option with less plastic packaging?
- Is there an alternative made from recycled materials?
