There are still a few timed tickets remaining for this Sunday afternoon's juried Trashion on the Trail at Hilltop meadow, located between the east and west Grand Forest.

The event will feature the chance to...

Thank you to the sustainability-minded sponsors of this year's outfit awards: Bainbridge Disposal, Green Mountain Technologies, Hey Day Farm, Clark Construction, Firefly Salon, A Kitchen That Works, and Plum.

We also appreciate our in-kind sponsors: Bainbridge Arts & Crafts, F.R.O.G. Soap, Eleven Winery, Island Cool, Bon Bon's, BI Parks and Rec, Scrappy Art Lab, Jen Colburn Design, and Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.

We also collected 1700 CDs/DVDs, which will be recycled by GreenDisk. Once again, grateful drivers generously donated more than $3200 toward Zero Waste projects. We hope to have the next collection in January 2022. Until then, keep your Styro clean and dry, or see our our web page for other drop-off options.

Do you have fruit trees or grow produce on your property? If so, meet Kitsap Harvest, an organization that harvests and distributes surplus urban fruit and vegetables in Kitsap County. In 2019, they distributed over 91,000 tons to food banks, shelters and soup kitchens throughout the county.

Now KH is trying to expand their gleaning sites, grow-a-row donations, and overall volunteer action on Bainbridge Island. To find out more about KH and how to contribute your excess, please go here.

To help meet eco-challenge goals that involve foregoing plastic, Barbara Ochota designed this month's farmers' market booth to highlight bath and kitchen products that come in plastic-less packaging. Were there ever some great conversations! Below are examples of differently packaged laundry and dish cleaning products. (She swears by both of the paper-packaged ones.)

There was also a display of recyclable vs nonrecyclable plastic film, which belongs in grocery collection bins, not with the curbside or transfer station mixed recycling. If you need a refresher on the kinds of "stretchy" plastic that can be dropped off at T&C or Safeway, go here.

It is estimated that we ingest a credit card's worth of plastic a week. Though it may be impossible to keep plastic from entering our bodies via air and water, women do have a choice regarding feminine hygiene products. The Plastic Pollution Coalition has a wonderful reference page evaluating reusable menstrual options.

You may have read recently in the Kitsap Sun that the recycling and yard waste rules, they are a-changin'. The newspaper jumped the gun a bit, as the county is still in the final stages of preparing its new informational posters and guides to explain the revised lists of acceptable items. These guides will be passed along to Bainbridge Disposal for distribution.

The major recycling changes are to now put milk and juice cartons and frozen food boxes in the trash. The former have a plastic lining and the latter an additive to thwart box sogginess, Both prevent the paper from being separated in the pulping process, so these items end up in the industrial waste pile at the pulp mill. Better to toss them in the trash at home than to spend energy, time and money to throw them away further down the line.

(Note that the juice box and soup carton pictured above have never been accepted in our recycling.)

For more information about the rule changes, you can listen to the Senior Center's half-hour Something to Talk About conversation with Zero Waste's Barbara Ochota and Diane Landry.

Once again, Bennington College's Center for the Advancement of Public Action is offering the online class "Beyond Plastic Pollution". I plug this auditable course every time because it is an excellent primer into the world of plastic and activism. Judith Enck, a former EPA official in the Obama administration, teaches the seven-week class, which meets every Wednesday from 4-6pm PST and runs from September 1-October 13.

Upon course completion, an additional benefit is the opportunity to join the Beyond Plastics group listserv and meet online once a month to discuss and get involved in graduates' various projects that aim to reduce plastic use.

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