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One of the most visited locations in any community is the local grocery store. Whether it is a 50,000 square foot food emporium or a 5000 square foot neighborhood market, we all wander the aisles looking for things to eat for our upcoming meals. Did you ever stop to think what is being done to make this place greener, or are you rushing through the store too quickly to get the task of shopping complete to even think about it? Some grocery chains are putting in place some serious changes to make their operations as green as possible, but there are simple things any store can do if it wants to have a significant impact on its local community starting tomorrow.
A grocery store operation is a very diverse enterprise dealing with transportation, food preparation, waste removal, maintenance operations and warehouse management. They need to dispose of everything from meat bones and trimmings to rotting produce, from used fryer oil to the jar of mayonnaise that you dropped on aisle 5 as well as a whole host of packaging materials from shrink wrap to cardboard, so is it possible to make an operation like that greener?
Let's take each department as a separate entity and see what simple changes can be made to make the store greener internally, as well as what gets disbursed from the store out into the community. There really are two different ways to look at any enterprise in terms of environmental responsibility, those being: how do they handle their internal waste and how much waste do they push out to their local community in the form of trash that needs to be dealt with by their customers. Let's look first at what they put out into the community for the customer to deal with as those are the easier problems to address.
Many states and municipalities are addressing the issue of plastic bags, so I won't concern myself with that here. If we look at the meat department, produce department, the prepared foods section if your store has one and the bakery department, they all have one thing in common in that they deliver items to the customer in some form of packaging. By eliminating or improving the packaging, they can affect a huge positive change in the local community.
Meat, fish and chicken are all packaged in trays after they have been cut up and those could be biodegradable trays that are also compostable, so their disposal is as simple as putting them in a compost bin. Compostable trays are made from sugar cane or other renewable fibers and can be composted in a commercial facility in as short a span of time as 60 days. The prepared foods counter uses plates, bowls, platters and hinged lid containers so that patrons can take their food to go and those can also be biodegradable containers and biodegradable tableware made from a compostable material as well.
The same can be said for the tub that holds the mushrooms in the produce department as well as the material that rests below the birthday cake or bundt cake that comes from the bakery. By switching to greener materials the grocery store has a direct impact on the amount of trash that its community has to put in a landfill as opposed to a compost pile. And we haven't even discussed how your local grocery store can recycle the waste oil from its fryers after making fried chicken, and recycle it into biodiesel fuel to power its own trucks.
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