Green Tip: Reuse and Food

The Palisadian-Post has partnered with locally founded environmental organization Resilient Palisades to deliver a “green tip” to our readers in each newspaper. This edition’s tip was written by Lisa Kaas Boyle.

We Palisadians are fortunate to live in a walkable community with many excellent restaurants and a thriving farmers market. But are we making the most of these resources in a waste-free fashion to protect our environment and our health from the impacts of waste?

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, food and food packaging materials make up almost half of all municipal solid waste. Takeout food is often placed into plastic or Styrofoam containers, and put into paper bags or plastic grocery bags. These bags may contain plastic cutlery, napkins and straws. That’s a lot of waste beginning with its creation and most often ending in landfill and in our environment.

There is so much accumulated plastic in our water ecosystems (by some estimates, 8,300 million metric tons of plastic has been produced since around 1950) that some scientists view plastic accumulation as a “key geologic indicator” of our current geological time period, dubbing it the Anthropocene.

But you can break the cycle of food packaging pollution by bringing your own reusable containers for takeout from our local restaurants and refusing plastic cutlery and straws. California Assembly Bill 619 was passed in July 2019 allowing reusable containers provided or returned to the food facility to be filled by either the employee or the owner of the container. Reusable containers must be clean, and also designed and constructed for reuse. A wide variety of reuse containers is available on the site lifewithoutplastic.com.

In addition, bring your own bags to the farmers market, grocery store and restaurants for takeout. Resilient Palisades hands out free reusable bags for produce at our farmers market to encourage the practice.

Finally, make sure to put your food waste in the green bin for composting. In addition to yard trimmings, LA Department of Sanitation allows for the following in the green bin:

• Food scraps: fruits, vegetables, dairy, eggshells, bread, cereal, grains, pasta, rice, beans, meat, bones, fish, shells, coffee grounds
• Food-soiled paper products: including pizza boxes and coffee filters
• Natural wood: including clean untreated wood and wood chopsticks that are not lacquered
• 100% natural bamboo: clean, untreated, not coated
• Natural corks (consider a web search for “cork recycling”)