The store is launching our Wasteless Wednesday campaign on October 3rd, 2018. This is not affiliated with Wasteless Wednesday.

What is the Wasteless Wednesday?

It is a call out to encourage people to be Waste-Free on Wednesday of each week.

The first step is about awareness. Then action. Try it for a Wednesday or two. You might find you like how it makes you feel. You may even incorporate some of the waste-reduction strategies into your life on a continual basis.

We think that people are aware that we cannot continue to generate the amount of packaging we currently consume in our society. Wasteless Wednesday is an introduction to living a waste-reduced life.

What are some of the things you can do on Wasteless Wednesday?

• Join your local Waste-Free group – Join Waste-Free Edmonton or Plastic-Free YYC.
• Prepare – get your reusables ready the day before so that they are all ready to grab in the morning. Containers for your lunch, travel mug, water bottle, straw, napkin, cutlery, etc.
• Pack Your Own – If you take your own lunch/food to work with you have control over the amount of waste associated with it. The same is true about taking your own coffee at home. You will also save money. Try supporting local independent coffee shops and other businesses
• Take a reusable shopping bag with you just in case you stop off to do some shopping.
• Take all your compostables home to compost.
• Pick up some litter and put it into an appropriate bin (recycle or waste)
• Compliment someone who is reusing something (someone in the coffee line that has their own mug refilled), picking up some litter, etc
• Share on Social Media (#WastelessWednesday) a photograph of your day’s wins
• Good going!

Check out our social media stream for ideas every Wednesday morning.

How is the store going to support people participate in Wasteless Wednesday?

To encourage people to start participating in the Wasteless Wednesday campaign, we will offer a 25 cent ‘reward’ for every containers/bag you use to refill something in our store for each Wednesday during the month of October. This will include reused bags used for purchasing fresh produce as well.

Perhaps you could mention Wasteless Wednesday to other businesses that you frequent to see if they want to participate in this campaign. Perhaps the coffee shop will give you a double discount on reusing your own mug on that day? (It would be easier to convince a local independent coffee shop to participate rather than a corporate shop).

We hope that people will join in as they have for Meatless Mondays, Giving Tuesday, Throwback Thursday, Follow Friday, etc.

#MeatlessMonday #WastelessWednesday

My thoughts on Wasteless Wednesday and the corporate agenda

As I was creating this day of action, I thought I would do some research to see if anyone has launched a version of Wasteless Wednesday yet. There was. The Wastelss Wednesday website and social media campaign is actually a project by Keep America Beautiful (KAB) via America Recycles Day, an industry astroturf group. Albeit, their site does talk about waste reduction.

Keep America Beautiful is one of the first industry groups to sideline efforts by governments to address waste. The group was launched at a time that industry wanted to cease having to be responsible for their packaging – washing and reusing their beer, milk and beverage bottles and instead produce single-use containers. This produced a littering and waste management problem which continues to this day.

Keep America Beautiful expertly shifted the focus away from littering and reusing to recycling and put much of the cost of this onto the governments and society to deal with. Brilliant campaign but one we are facing the consequences today and tomorrow.

The industry also knows that a change is coming. Those industries have to look like they are engaging society to reduce plastic and single-use products. They are smart to get ahead of this. KAB also know that their efforts will not keep pace with the growth of single-use consumption.