[Market-farming] market supplies: plastic bags, berry baskets, etc.
Road's End Farm
organic87 at frontiernet.net
Wed May 13 09:55:41 EDT 2009
On May 13, 2009, at 12:06 AM, jay sleichter wrote:
> Liz,
> That is the weirdest comment I have ever heard. "If you are organic,
> you can't reuse bags?" That doesn't make sense. Isn't that kind of
> the opposite of what most people,who buy organic, think and are
> supporting? Use less resources, chemicals, fertilizer, better for you
> and the environment, but you must use this new bag and waste resources
> or your own to transport your produce home in.
>
> Besides, if the bag was dirty, what is the reasoning behind this.
>
The reasoning is that used bags and used boxes may have non-permissible
chemicals on them, as those chemicals may have been on the previous
contents of the containers. Therefore, it's advised (I'm not sure if
it's required) not to use secondhand containers to pack into, unless
they're made of a material that can be washed out before use. Washing
plastic bags is usually impractical.
There's also the sanitary question, that there's no way to be sure that
what was in the bag previously was itself clean, and not harmful for
human consumption. People put all kinds of things in grocery-style
bags; not all of them are something that you want to eat after. I think
(though am not certain) that grocery stores are forbidden to take in
used plastic or paper bags and hand them out again to different
customers than the ones who brought them in, for that reason.
It is of course OK to pack, for a given customer, into the bag that
that specific customer brings. I've found that it's getting more and
more common for my customers to have brought their own bags; often ones
designed as reusable bags, but sometimes they bring ones designed to be
single use and refill those.
Before this came up as an issue for organic growers, I had already gone
off using bags that had been handed to me by customers. A few times of
reaching in to a pile of these and hauling out something that's sticky
and stinks to high heaven will do that to you; or, at least, it did it
to me. Being able to blame my refusal to take these on the
certification agency gives me a more polite way to refuse them.
I do take back containers such as cardboard berry tills that have my
own stickers on them (though these are often not clean enough, in my
opinion, to reuse; but they are recyclable here), and I do take
clamshells if offered them, as I can wash them before reusing.
Some growers, and some markets, sell reusable bags at discount prices,
to encourage customers to use those instead. These can generally be
thrown in the wash.
-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale
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