- Encouraging individual food establishments with capacity to create its own in-house returnable deposit container programs.
- Area-wide reuse & refill eco-system of wash and delivery of dishes for reuse for deposit, which would allow small food businesses with no machine dishwashers on site to participate.
- Area-wide composting eco-system – Food scraps and organic matters don’t belong to landfills! We see composting not an abstruse science project for those high-minded but primarily as a simple & easy method for climate mitigation and waste reduction that everybody can and should participate, to keep their “wastes” out of waste streams.
- Area-wide system for wine bottle reuse for the area wineries and cideries.
- Making Ithaca and Tompkins a Zero Waste City / Municipality! For example…
- Ban single-use disposables in all places where the ban is warranted – ex. ban sale of water bottles and replace it with water refilling stations; ex.2 pass Beyond Plastics bill
- Make BRO (utensils By Requests Only) a law
- Mandate reusables for dine-in
- Have the City of Ithaca / Tompkins County declare itself as compost-friendly city / municipality
- Rally for more funding for Zero Waste education – ex. make strong civic and composting education mandatory at public schools
- Make BYO, reusable foodwares, composting and recycling mandatory at festivals
- Support much stronger ReUse sector
- Support deconstruction and recycling of construction wastes
- ..and more.
Future Projects on Our Radar
Zero Waste Ithaca 