By Sarah Berg, Acting Director, Center for Climate Justice and Faith

With two very young children and a pandemic, my family slipped into some less-than-sustainable habits over the last few years (e.g. Amazon deliveries, take-out, so many individually wrapped cheese sticks…). Now that lockdown is behind us and my youngest is officially a toddler, we embarked on the #FewerPlasticsForLent challenge to see what changes we could make to reduce our plastic use. On a recent trip to Berkeley Bowl, my two “helpers” and I spent some extra time examining our options and discovered many easy and low-cost ways to reduce the number of single-use plastics that come into our home:

1. Peanut Butter: Swapped Jif Creamy ($0.23 / oz) in a plastic jar for Adam’s Natural Creamy ($0.30 / oz) in a glass jar. Price difference: +$1.00
2. Bread: Swapped plastic-wrapped St. Louis Sourdough ($7.19) for fresh Acme Sourdough ($6.29) wrapped in a paper bag. Price difference: -$0.90
3. Granola: Re-filled last week’s plastic bag of granola from the bulk section instead of grabbing a new plastic bag. Price difference: none
4. Raisins: Re-filled last week’s plastic bag of raisins from the bulk section instead of grabbing a new plastic bag. Price difference: none
5. Applesauce: Swapped Mott’s Applesauce ($0.17 / oz) in a plastic jar for Berkeley Bowl Applesauce ($0.19 / oz)  in a glass jar. Price difference: +$1.00
6. Spinach: traded a 1 lb plastic box of Organic Girl Baby Spinach ($7.69) for 1 lb of organic baby spinach that I put into a reusable mesh bag ($4.99). Price difference: -$2.70
7. Toilet Paper: This wasn’t even on my radar, but we were able to buy Cabo bamboo toilet paper ($0.03 / ft2) wrapped in paper instead of Charmin ($0.06/ft2) wrapped in plastic. Price Difference: -$2.50

I was surprised to see that we saved $4.10 by making the very simple changes above. With just a little more planning to grab the plastic bags from the week before to reuse and some mesh bags for produce we were able to reduce a lot of the plastic that comes into our house each week. Unfortunately, there were still several items that we couldn’t find without plastic packaging such as cheese, yogurt, and meat. We’ll be keeping our eyes open to find more affordable substitutes for these items.