After nearly two years of planning and implementation, we are excited to announce that, beginning in January, our Whole Foods Market commissary kitchen in Massachusetts will get 100% of its electricity from recycled cooking oil.  Yeah!

The waste vegetable oil used for frying food at the commissary kitchen facility as well as from 21 Whole Foods Market stores across the Northeast region, will be used as a biofuel in a cogeneration module using an internal combustion engine to generate electricity and usable heat.  We expect to repurpose over 1,200 gallons of cooking oil a week, which was previously considered a waste product, to fuel a system that reduces our dependency on conventional fossil fuel sources and results in less harmful emissions — helping us move one step closer to our goal of becoming a zero waste company. The generator will have the capacity to meet the electricity needs of the entire commissary, just over 2,000,000 kWh’s per year.  Producing electricity with waste biomass avoids new carbon dioxide emissions attributed to electricity generated using fossil fuels. Vegetable oil exhaust emissions that are produced contain virtually zero sulfur oxides and sulfates, major contributors to acid rain.

The Boston Globe ran a great in-depth story on the new generator.  Lifecycle Renewables will be installing and operating the system as well as coordinating and managing the logistics involved with weekly waste cooking oil collections and fuel delivery.

A huge thank you to everyone who has worked on bringing this great project to fruition.

We have a really cool new bag coming out! You’ve probably seen our large grocery tote bags made from recycled plastic bottles for only 99 cents. Our customers have given us great feedback on them.

When it came time to design a new bag, we wanted to make it even better. We came up with several ideas and these two rose to the top:
1. generate public interest in reusable bags by getting an environmentally conscious celebrity to help design the bag and
2. highlight a strong environmental program on the bag that is helping to change our world.

Done and done. Sheryl Crow collaborated with us on the design of the bag. Didn’t it turn out great?

The Natural Resources Defense Council promotes a great program called Simple Steps. In addition to our monetary donation to the NRDC, each bag has the SimpleSteps.org website printed on it, which encourages customers to embrace simple steps in their everyday lives that reduce consumption and consider the environment.

Since it is gift-giving season, the bags are available in the large grocery tote size and also in a smaller, gift bag size for only 79 cents. Check ‘em out and let us know what you think.

When we sell through this run of bags, we’ll be designing the next version. What ideas do you have for taking these to the next level?

Hello!!!

Everyone is headed back to school! Parents get a reprieve while kids get on their schedule again. Since different parts of the country go back to school at different times, we focus on back to school for both August and September in Whole Body, and you’ll find some great products featured. Need a great vitamin? In August we highlighted New Chapter’s Every Kid Organic MultiVitamin. It is kind of like a Pixie Stix^TM except it is a supplement and made with organic sweeteners. The Goodness Grape flavor is exclusively available at Whole Foods Market!

In September we are featuring a full array of fun kid’s bath products from Aura Cacia. My daughter loves pumping the foamy body wash herself and playing with the bubbles. (Yes, that’s her in the photo!)

In addition to these featured products, all of our Whole Body departments have an amazing array of kid’s products for all ages and many of our stores are featuring notebooks and other back to school supplies from New Leaf Paper, which is a company that is changing the way we look at paper production. Did you know that by switching to paper made with post-consumer recycled content is a great way to reduce your environmental impact? Not only do you save trees, you save water, energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well. This is because making paper from waste paper is a less polluting and less resource intensive process than making paper from trees.

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On June 25th, we welcomed a new store in Reno, California. There are many green aspects of our new store from skylights to new LED lights in frozen cases. One of the most exciting is a new partnership with Full Circle Compost and Hungry Mother Organics. At Whole Foods Market our sustainability goals include moving to zero waste by keeping organic waste out of landfills. Since the city of Reno doesn’t compost, Full Circle is going to take our food waste and make it into compost for us. Full Circle recycles organic waste into high quality soil amendments and custom soil mixes for the Reno area. Hungry Mother Organics is the nursery part of the business and uses the soil Full Circle produces to grow backyard garden starts and vegetables for local restaurants. My favorite part about Full Circle is that they are located at the Carson City Prison Work Farm. They use inmate labor to run the compost farm and the nursery. The prisoners get fresh air, learn job skills and get to eat all the fresh salad they want!

Mark of Hungry Mother Organics in his green house where compost from the food waste we send becomes part of the soil that grows these lovely tomato plants.

Vegetable scraps we send are placed in the giant worm box and the worms eat it to produce a nutrient rich fertilizer called worm castings.

Our first load of compost being dumped at Full Circle and Adesina sorting through it to see if our Team Members have learned the right things to put in the compost compactor.

Probably the most common (and cliché) “green tip” is to change out your traditional incandescent light bulbs for those curly compact fluorescent (CFL) ones. I’m sure everyone has heard this, and most of you have probably done it. You may have even noticed your electric bill go down since these bulbs use one-fifth of the energy of an incandescent (and they last 7-10 times as long).

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Wanted to share with everyone the answer to a recent question about the plastic containers used in our prepared foods. Our customer Julie wrote:

Great to see the blog and I’m looking forward to reading it and seeing all of the great things Whole Foods will be doing for it’s customers and the world. One quick question, though, as I’m sitting here eating my yummy Whole Foods gazpacho. After taking it from its Number 5 plastic container, I’m wondering what other options you have for selling so much of your pre-packaged and prepared foods. I’m a regular purchaser of a bunch of those products, and I’m always frustrated that it has to come in the plastic containers that are not recyclable anywhere in my region.

Has WF ever thought about inviting customers to return their plastic containers to them? Is there any way you can sanitize them and reuse them? There are only so many uses of these containers in my house, and I do find myself guiltily throwing them out. I have Spring Water delivered to my house, and every two weeks, I put out the old containers, and they give me new. The water company does something to the containers that I use and then refills them and uses them again. I’d be thrilled to take my #5 containers back each week to WF. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
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I’m not talking about what it looks like when I’m left in charge of the grill at family summer cookouts. Tongs in hand, I typically try really hard not to think about the pig lips my brother assures me are in the 12-for-a-dollar hot dogs that Aunt Minnie brought—and they end up neglected and charred.

No, I’m pondering our current food system and agricultural production methods that are big contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Over the past three or four years, I have been working hard to reduce my own footprint across many fronts and I realize how many trade-offs we all wrestle with as we consider behavior and lifestyle changes. Read the rest of this entry »

Green products are a big deal and getting bigger, but how big can they get and still be green? While more companies are starting to talk the talk, very few are actually doing the walk. Greenwashing, the practice of misleading consumers about the environmental benefits of a particular product or service, is a growing problem.

So how do you know what’s fact or fiction when it comes to green claims? You can start with this recent Boston Globe article that discusses how some companies are exploiting the green market by greenwashing their products. The Six Sins of Greenwashing site will familiarize you with common methods used by companies that are less than forthcoming about what they’re trying to sell you. Finally, you can heighten your green awareness in the marketplace by checking out the Greenwashing Index, a forum that evaluates the greenness of various marketing campaigns.

If you know of other sources for verifying green claims, or if you have questions or concerns about greenwashing in general, please share them with us.

The votes are in and the loser is: Factory Farming. In a strongly-worded report released on April 29, experts concluded that factory farming is bad for the environment, human health, the economy and, of course, farm animals.

Check out this Washington Post article for details, as well as this Successful Farming article that includes a link to the full report (PDF format), then weigh in with your opinion on this critical green issue.

Proud papa Jim sent us this “If Kids Ruled the World” video saying, “The kids (and parents) at my son’s preschool are so happy that you are eliminating disposable plastic shopping bags that they all got together and made a professional looking video about the subject. The video was shot at the local Whole Foods (in Los Altos, CA) with store permission and it end up winning second place at the local Earth Day film festival.” Hmmm…think any child labor laws are being violated here?