We hope that you like the new Stop Waste CSA Box that we have put into use this week! The goal of replacing the waxed cardboard boxes that we have been using is to eliminate the waste of sending them to the landfill.
Most produce is shipped from farms in single use containers. The predominant container is a waxed box, the wax being necessary because un-waxed boxes will not hold up stacked on a pallet when they are full of wet and iced produce. Waxed boxes cannot be recycled and are rarely composted. They generally end up in the landfill.
For farmers markets and many restaurants, Full Belly packs our boxes into permanent plastic totes, so why not do that for our CSA members as well? The trick will be that since every Stop Waste CSA Box is worth $12, every CSA member will have to return the box faithfully, but preferably leave it at their pick-up site.
This is a trial run and all of our CSA members can help! Please do not take the boxes home with you – come to your pick-up site with a bag and leave the Stop Waste CSA Box behind, nested into each other in a stack for Full Belly to pick up.
Every week, 48 weeks per year more than 1,100 families get a Full Belly CSA box. Even though the the waxed cardboard CSA boxes are returned and reused several times, we still calculate that more than 15,000 end up in the landfill every year. From our experience with hard plastic boxes, we predict that we will get hundreds of uses out of each Stop Waste CSA Box rather than just 4 or 5. That means years of use for every box and many pounds of waste eliminated from landfills on a yearly basis.
It all depends on our Full Belly CSA membership. Because the boxes are expensive, we need to have them return to the farm week in and week out. This trial experiment was made possible by a grant from StopWaste.org.
