Bring-Your-Own Container in Precycle Grocery Store

Bring-Your-Own Container in Precycle Grocery Store

It is a favorable time for eradicating disposable food items in New York. Plastic straws are being eliminated; the city’s foam container ban just went into effect; some Whole Foods containers were found to have chemicals linked to cancer, and now the city’s first “package-free” grocery store has opened in Bushwick.

Precycle

Precycle, as it's called is owned by Katerina Bogatireva. Her goal is to eliminate unnecessary waste before it happens. How? By encouraging customers to bring their own vessels and pay only for the amounts they take. According to Katerina, people will value food if they see it the way it is, no containers. 

Create a shopping environment that is more efficient and eco-friendlier than the typical grocery store.

She hopes that by asking customers to be mindful about the food they buy, she can create a shopping environment that is more efficient and eco-friendlier than the typical grocery store. She boasts that after their first-week run, the trash only weighed less than five pounds. She is now working with vendors to also minimize their own packaging as it is being delivered to her store.

This approach offers lower prices on the goods.

The advantage for shoppers is that this approach offers lower prices on the goods. (According to one recent report, buying prepackaged oats means paying a 219 percent premium over buying oats in bulk.) In practice, the experience of shopping at a store invested in minimalism can feel a bit like the 1984 version of buying groceries, but people who have shopped at the Park Slope Food Coop won’t feel too much culture shock.

Slow progress

Still, it seems fair to say that people who go to Whole Foods and Fairway to load their carts with weeks’ (or even months’) worth of groceries won’t be regulars at Precycle, but even in the store’s earliest days, it feels like a positive step forward, and another reminder that it’s not too difficult to be  more aware of our own impact on the environment. “You start with banning the straw and then the cup,” Bogatireva says. “I know that the progress has to be slower — it’s not easy to convince everyone all at once.”

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