Maria's Market is the main supermarket in Recycle City. Maria tries to stock items and provide services in her store that reduce the amount of material going into the waste stream and encourage reuse and recycling.
When the clean-up of old Dumptown began, Maria realized that the first and best thing she should do was to reduce the amount of waste her customers had to throw away after they bought products at her market.
Shop around and find out what else Maria's Market does to help.
Imagine you manage your own supermarket...more
What are some things you can do to reduce the amount of waste caused by the products you sell?
In many parts of the country, supermarkets place recycling containers near the store to encourage their customers to recycle. (They can be any shape, really -- they can even be automated, like vending machines -- but Recycle City uses these brightly colored igloos because they're fun.)
These igloos are used to collect bottles, cans, and plastic from Maria's Market shoppers. Twice a week, trucks from the local Materials Recovery Facility come by to empty the igloos and take the items for recycling.
Should you ask for a paper or plastic bag at the checkout counter? There's no easy answer. The materials needed to make either bag come from our natural resources.
The trees needed to make paper are considered renewable resources. That means more trees can be planted to take the place of trees that are cut down to make paper and other products. However, trees take many years to replace because they grow slowly. Once paper is made, it can be recycled and used to create more paper goods. Making it into new paper, however, uses water and energy.
Petroleum needed to make plastic is considered a non-renewable resource. Like aluminum, tin, and steel, petroleum is not renewable because it is the result of geological processes that take millions of years. When used up, the earth's petroleum reserves will be gone for a long, long time. While plastic bags are easy to reuse, they're seldom recycled, and lots and lots of them get dumped into landfills.
The best solution is to use a sturdy reusable bag for shopping, or to bring your old plastic or paper bag back to the store when you shop again. (Some stores, like Maria's Market in Recycle City, credit your grocery bill for reusing old bags because they don't have to buy as many new ones.) If you only purchase one or two items, you might not need a bag at all.
Packaging materials make up more than 30 percent of all consumer waste. Maria's Market offers shoppers many fresh foods and bulk foods to help reduce the amount of waste from too much packaging.
Fresh foods, such as bananas, oranges, and nuts come in their own natural packaging and are excellent sources of nutrition.
Bulk items and food purchased in bulk quantities allow Maria's shoppers to decide exactly how much they want to buy. For small needs, folks measure out the exact quantity they want, helping to reduce food waste. For larger needs, they can buy much more, without lots more packaging.
When purchasing fresh foods or buying in bulk, shoppers can put their purchases into refillable containers they bring to the store or into the recyclable or reusable bags Maria provides.
To reduce the amount of waste and its impact on the environment, Maria began to stock items in the store that contained fewer harmful ingredients and used less packaging. To reduce packaging and wasted food, she created a section in the store where shoppers could buy food in bulk, measuring out the exact amounts they needed.
In her produce section, Maria struck a deal with area farmers. As she sells their seasonal fruit and vegetables, Maria uses their plastic and wood crates right on the refrigerated shelves, returning them to the farmers with the next delivery. That way, Maria and the farmers avoid creating wasteful and expensive packaging long before the customers ever have to choose between paper or plastic.
Maria also set up a program to reuse those things that could be reused, such as cardboard boxes that shoppers could use to carry their purchases and bring back to the store on their next visit. She also gave customers discounts for returning their plastic bags the next time they shopped and for bringing their own cloth sacks to carry groceries home.
Finally, Maria made sure that many of the items in the store could be easily recycled. She set up well-marked collection containers to make it easy for shoppers to participate in the market's recycling program. Maria knows that recycling keeps useful materials from going into landfills, helping to preserve the land in and around Recycle City for other uses, like parks and schools.
The cardboard boxes used to ship food to Maria's Market can be put to a variety of other uses once the food has been unpacked. The folks at the market let Recycle City residents come by and pick up cartons for storing things or moving to a new home. Any cartons that aren't claimed by the residents are broken down and put into a pile so they can be collected, recycled, and made into other things, like new boxes, paper bags, building insulation, animal bedding, or packaging materials.
When you shop, look for products that can be recycled—or have been recycled already! Read the label, and look for the highest percentage of “post-consumer recycled content.” That means your new paper product was made using a certain amount of previously used paper products.
Many paper products on the shelves today have already been recycled. By buying recycled products, you help save valuable natural resources and help to create a market for those materials. When manufacturers know that shoppers want recycled goods, they will make more of them.
In Maria's Market, the popularity of paper towels and toilet paper made from recycled materials ensures that fewer new trees have to be cut down to produce new products.
When the buyers at Maria's Market place orders to restock the store, they try to order items with very little packaging, or that use ecological packaging (requiring as little energy and as few resources as possible to produce).
Maria's buyers also try to stock products that come in refillable containers. Products that don't harm the environment and come in ecologically friendly packages are called “green” products.
Packaging that isn't environmentally friendly includes products that are wrapped in several layers of plastic, use plastic foam, or have individually wrapped packages inside of a larger wrapped package.
Maria's buyers let the makers of these products know that they and their Recycle City customers would rather buy products wrapped in environmentally friendly packages than ones that aren't. Using this kind of packaging is good for the manufacturer's business.
Every light bulb in Recycle City has been replaced with a more energy efficient fluorescent or LED light bulb. Citizens are saving thousands of dollars using less electricity to light their homes, streets and city buildings.
