Organic Festival at Wegmans for Earth Day

Earth Day is right around the corner on April 22, and is celebrating the Earth by asking residents to bring in their plastic bags from home for recycling. 

Wegmans will be commemorating Earth Day with an Organic Festival on Saturday, April 21 between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., and when you bring in your plastic bags during the Organic Festival, Wegmans will provide you with a coupon for one free Wegmans reusable bag.

The Organic Festival will also feature activities for kids and tasting samples of organic food. While the coupons for reusable bags will only be available on April 21 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., the Organic Festival will also be celebrated on Friday, April 20 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. and on Saturday, April 28 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Wegmans has been promoting the use of reusable bags for several years, according to a release issued by the food market chain, and since the introduction of reusable plastic bags by the supermarket in 2007 Wegmans has reduced their plastic bag use by about 4,000.

“We need to keep making improvements to our plastic bags since they are used most often. For those who choose to use plastic, we simply ask them to bring the bags back to us for recycling, so that we can make more bags,” Wegmans’ sustainability coordinator, Jason Wadsworth, said.

The bags that are used at check-out will be made of at least 40 percent of previously used plastic bags - a new plastic bag that sets a high bar for environmental sustainability, the press release says.

“We’re really excited about this,” Wadsworth said. “We’ve never had a plastic bag with so much recycled content before. We’re also introducing the bag-to-bag concept. All of the plastic bags customers bring back to our stores for recycling will now go toward making the 40 percent bags. This easy-to-understand idea may encourage more customers to return plastic bags for recycling.”

Wegmans has also created a Recycling Report Card which shows all of the environmental efforts the company has done in the past year.

Highlights:

• Wegmans donated 16 million pounds of food to local food banks and pantries and composted 2.3 million pounds of food waste, keeping the equivalent of 215 tractor-trailer loads of food out of landfills.
• 107 million pounds of cardboard and office paper were recycled, saving 598,000 trees.
• 3 million pounds of plastic bags and wrapping were recycled during 2011 – saving the equivalent energy use of 381 homes for one year.

According to the release, choosing organic food benefits the air, water, and soil and organic foods are linked to environmental sustainability as organic farmers do not use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides.

For more information on Wegmans' environmental sustainability efforts, look for the "About Us" section at the bottom of the homepage and click on the sustainability link.