At the Greenbelt Co-op Supermarket, it’s hard to tell this is Earth Month, because around here every month is Earth Month. With solar panels on the roof, a growing selection of earth-friendly household and cleaning products on the shelves, and cardboard boxes and expired produce going out the back door to support the vermicomposting efforts of Greenbelt’s volunteer Hot Composting Group, the Co-op is upping its environmentally friendly game.
The Co-op’s new, highly insulated roof and solar panels saved $34,000 in electricity cost in the first full year of its installation. It also saved about 428,281.84 lbs. of CO2 emissions, which is the equivalent of planting about 3,235 trees. Not too shabby.
The panels were installed in 2019 thanks to $406,287 in community loans and gifts as well as a State of Maryland grant. Six-hundred-and-four 400-watt solar panels totaling approximately 20,000 square feet almost completely cover the roof.
Meanwhile, down on the ground, the Co-op partners with the Hot Composting Group and a New Deal Café group calling itself The Wigglers to divert food waste and create vermicompost. The Co-op also provides cardboard boxes for the finished product.
Each week, an assigned composting group “bucketeer” picks up as many buckets of food as the Co-op puts out and returns the same number of clean buckets for refill.
“From March 2021 through our last workday that year on November 21, we diverted 4,251 pounds (of food waste),”
organizer Hally Ahearn said. “Add to this an estimated gleaning of 275 pounds, when Wiggler members took food that was still usable and made lots of applesauce and apple cake, among other things…. That’s about 500 pounds a month.”
“The Co-op board and management are really happy to have found a use for produce past its prime that would otherwise be wasted,” board member Johanna Goderre said. “It feels great to play a part in this community-driven project.”
Over the course of the Greenbelt Farmers Market season, consumers made donations to the Hot Composting Group to receive about 150 one-pound bags of vermicompost. They learned about how it was made and how the waste food was diverted from the Co-op. The Hot Composting group also gave away roughly 100 pounds of vermicompost to the volunteer Wigglers, who were “working for black gold,” Ahearn said.
This March, the Hot Composters sifted and boxed over 300 pounds of vermicompost, harvested from “worm condos” on the New Deal Café’s back deck. They used hefty cardboard boxes from the Co-op to package 10- and 20-pound boxes of this magical garden material for their spring donation drive, where smart gardeners snapped it up at a price break from the normal farmers market pricing.
Inside the Co-op, an increasing number of earth-friendly household and cleaning products are being stocked on the shelves. Dr. Bronner, Desert Essence, Caster & Bollox and Mrs. Meyers are just a few of the brands now found in the store. From household cleaners to skincare, from dog and cat food to toothpaste, more effort is being made to add organic and earth-friendly brands to the mix. Flyers listing earth-friendly household items appear in the store near the Roosevelt Center entrance.