People belong to food co-ops for a number of different reasons. Some do it because it’s local and convenient, or because of the quality of products available. Maybe it’s the democratic governance that attracts you? That’s a big one for me. I love the fact that I own this market with each of you.

It sounds kind of funny to say, but yes, each of us owns dividends. For me, it means that I have a right and responsibility to support my co-op to be the best it possibly can be, and because my background is in Zero Waste, I want to see us collectively coming together to shift some of the Co-op’s behaviors in line with our Ends, which oblige us to behave environmentally responsibly in all of our endeavors.

Sadly, that’s really tough for a grocery store to do, because our very market structure is based on behaviors that are not very sustainable at all. However, as a community, we have done some really cool things in the past several years that show we can work together to make shifts happen that benefit the environment.

At the last couple of Mt. Airy Village Fairs, for example, we banded together and turned our 700 pounds of trash into 80 pounds and then last fall just 40 pounds. How amazing is that — for 3,000-plus fairgoers to have such a small solid-waste impact says a lot about what’s possible.

We want to take sustainability to the next level at Weavers Way, but we need to hear from you. Over the next six months, I will be writing a monthly article pertaining to a variety of sustainability topics. Please check out these articles and don’t hesitate to send me an email if you are interested in supporting some initiatives that we might be launching.

Here’s one that could be very powerful:

Weavers Way is a member of the National Co-op Grocers, a trade group for food co-ops. One thing that NCG does is negotiate discounts for its members from large food producers and shippers including the distributor United Natural Foods Inc. UNFI is where we get most of our large grocery shipments, and their tractor-trailers make deliveries several times a week to our warehouse in Nicetown and to Ambler. These groceries come off of the truck on giant pallets of boxes stacked high and wrapped with plastic to hold them in place — lots and lots of plastic.

There are alternatives to single-use plastic pallet wrap, including reusable fabric pallet wraps. We’d like to use our collective voice to persuade NCG to ask UNFI to make the shift to reusable pallet wraps, saving thousands and thousands of pounds of plastic from the waste stream each year.

Here’s a petition to sign to get this started: www.change.org/p/unfi-unfi-to-switch-to-reusable-pallet-wrap.