I own and operate a small farm that focuses on producing high-quality, nutrient-dense leafy green vegetables while building healthy soils. Single use plastic packaging is industry standard for sanitation purposes. Packing leafy greens into plastic clam shells or deli containers ensures longer shelf-life of my products. Currently we use containers from The Bottle Box which are made from recycled water bottles. We have also used Eco-Products compostable containers, built our own composting system, but are wary of long-term application to our soil. Many, if not most, of our customers bring the empty packaging back to us for recycling/composting which they have kindly washed. We pay more for this recycled material than what it costs for new plastic and the compostable packaging is twice the cost of new plastic. I don’t want to just offload this material to a recycling center because, well it is precious to me. Lately I have been brainstorming how to make use of this resource on my farm. My background is in rapid prototyping so I am thinking of getting back into injection molding again to make products for farming. I don’t want to get too wrapped up in ideology, I just want to contribute what I can to our community with the goal of becoming a zero-waste (or closed-loop system) regenerative farm. So my first idea is to turn our barn shop into a maker’s space. I’m a little out of practice but I think can do this. Looking forward to exploring this together, nothing builds confidence like having an army beside you!
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