Whenever we reuse grocery bags at Whole Foods Market, we can earn Money for PHS Clubs
Whole Foods Market in Fort Collins at 2201 South College Ave will be partnering with all Poudre High School Clubs this quarter from January 21 st until April 13 th, 2008. As of 1/21/08 Whole Foods Market in Fort Collins will offer customers the option to obtain a $.10/bag refund when they reuse their bags OR they may donate this refund to Poudre High School. Whole Food Market will have in-store advertising of this, and the cashiers will ask each customer if they’d like to donate their refund to local schools, which for the next 3 months will be Poudre High School. This refund money will be split evenly among all the clubs at Poudre, so what a great way to help the environment by reducing the use of plastic bags and help fund our extracurricular activities at the same time.
Last quarter, the refund money went to Rocky Mountain High School. It is amazing that $1000 was donated by customers from their bag re-use donation and WFM in Fort Collins will “half match” that with an additional $500 bringing the total to $1500. This means that over 10,000 bags in Fort Collins were reused! We think that with Earth Week in April and nice spring weather we can raise even more money and prevent even more plastic from contaminating our land and oceans.
This is a small change we can all make that will make a big difference! Please inform all your friends to help support Poudre Clubs by re-using their bags when shopping at Whole Foods Market. If they don’t have reusable bags, they can buy them at the store for only 99 cents.
Other News about Whole Foods:
It is also good to note that our local Whole Foods Market has announced that all our stores will remove plastic grocery bags for packing customer’s groceries by Earth Day. They will continue to offer 100% recycled paper bags to help alleviate customer concerns, but are still requesting customers to use re-usable bags when possible. They want to do this because they know that U.S. stores go through 70 million plastic bags a year and most of these end up in our landfills or our oceans. These bags take over 200 years to even partially decompose, and often are never fully recycled into the natural ecosystems. It is also interesting to note that there is a giant island of trash, especially plastics, collecting on the eastern edge of the Pacific. This giant island, known as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is found in the center of the North Pacific Gyre (a clockwise rotation of ocean currents). The problem is that the trash that collected their in the past was biodegradable, whereas this plastic only photodegrades into smaller pieces of plastic which is then eaten by animals mistaken as plankton. This of course has no nutrient value and can often cause death by causing digestive blockages. You can try search for more information or videos on this online. Katie Couric of CBS recently reported on this in piece called “Sailing the Seas of Trash”.
The “Green Mission” Field trip in the words of Kim: “Jeramy, I would also like to offer your Environmental Club students a “green mission” tour of our facility. We put a lot of emphasis on running our business in the most eco-friendly way possible. Students would learn about composting, recycling, diverting items from the landfill, re-using, green building and lighting …. The desire is that they will learn some tips that they can use to be better stewards of our natural resources and that we can benefit from an informational exchange as well. This is a free tour and we would work with you to find a mutually workable time for the tour. They would need to wear closed toe shoes, long pants, have long hair tied back, and bring a cap to wear when they are in food preparation areas.”
If you’d like to thank someone, thank Kim Mueller the marketing Director at our local Whole Foods. The PHS Environmental Club has worked with her this fall and will be touring their facility next month to learn more about their “green” methods (see below for more details). She has been wonderful in many ways and wants to be a part of education our youth. Her email is kim.mueller@wholefoods.com