Head on over to the Sustainable Bainbridge Earth Month page to see a whole slate of environmental activities offered by these organizations:

• Bainbridge Public Library
• Eagle Harbor Books
• Veg Club
• BI Land Trust
• BI Senior Community Center
• Esther's Fabrics
• Weed Warriors
• Windermere
• IslandWood
• Parks District
• ReFashion Bainbridge
• BI Parks & Trails Foundation
• Kitsap County Solid Waste

Below we highlight

Reduce - Reuse - Recycle - Refresh

activities.

Gather your and your friends' Styrofoam for Kitsap Solid Waste's Styro recycling collection - the only one this year!

Bring only the snappable kind; no bendy foam. Make sure it's clean and dry. Remove all tape and stickers.

Driving along the road, you may not be aware of the cans and bottles chucked into ditches or candy wrappers tossed onto the ground, but they're there. And don't get me started on cigarette butts, the most ubiquitous of all! :(

Take this month to walk up and down a local road (with appropriately reflective apparel, of course!) and bag the plastics to keep them from breaking down into micro-sized pieces; recycle any relatively clean cans and bottles.

BI Zero Waste has grabbers you may borrow, whether picking up with a group or by yourself. Email us to request. Bainbridge Disposal has bags you may use and set out next to your curbside trash can for free pick-up. They are located in the courtyard at their office at Coppertop.

With a new market manager, our monthly booth schedule is not confirmed as of this printing. When we know, we will post in the Zero Waste Bainbridge Facebook group and on the home page of the Zero Waste website.

And although it's now collected year-round at the Senior Center, you may still bring your small metal scraps to our booth for recycling.

 Join the ZW Farmers Market



 Green Team

If you've been to the market and partaken of the tasty vendor food, you know that your plates, fiber clamshells, napkins and food scraps end up in a compost bin rather than the trash. That's because Zero Waste works with the vendors to use compostable service ware. Combined with a Green Team ambassador showing up to make sure everything is sorted correctly, you can be assured that recyclables and compostables end up in the right containers.

Please consider being a GT ambassador so we can keep composting at the market. The time commitment is about once a month, 11:30am-2pm, and you will have a mentor the first time out. Please email Diane Landry if interested.

The City of Bainbridge Island will conduct a 12-week study on kitchen pails for Bainbridge Island residents, beginning around July 2024.

Participating households will receive a complimentary kitchen pail, as well as educational materials on composting organic materials on Bainbridge Island and be asked to participate in a short survey at the end of the 12 weeks.

If your household is interested in joining this program, please complete this form, and a City staff member will contact you regarding your participation in the coming months. 

If you weren't one of the 150 persons who attended the second annual ReFashion Bainbridge clothing swap in March, never fear. Here are some upcoming classes to teach you how to maintain your apparel so you don't have to buy new:

• Visible mending
• Sock darning
• Pocket making (and come to the interesting History of Women's Pockets talk!)

Bay Hay and Feed collects plant tags year-round for recycling through Terracycle. They also take back 10-gallon or larger pots and plant trays in reusable condition, along with any Blooming Nursery plant pots.

To find out which size pots other local nurseries and farmers will reuse, see below or check out our Zero Waste Reuse/Recycle Guide. (And if you know of any others, please let me know.)

The Buy Nothing app and Facebook garden groups are other options for offering plant pots for reuse.

One ZW newsletter reader wrote in to explain how she has saved over $5000 in three years with just one major monetary outlay. Read on if you use a CPAP machine.

According to U.S. statistics, one in fifteen people suffer from sleep apnea, or about 66 ZW subscribers. Because the CPAP machine requires distilled water, users go through gallons of it. Our reader didn't like buying all those plastic jugs and eventually purchased a home water distiller. Because of the quantity and price of the water she bought, she figures in just four months she paid for that distiller and continues saving every day.

Whenever you are looking for a destination for something not accepted in your curbside bin, be sure to visit the

 "Guide to Reusing and/or Recycing Locally" on our website.