Sustainability in Action at Ballard Food Bank
By Lena Hart-Bundy, Program Coordinator
In honor of Earth Day, we’re taking a moment to delve into what sustainability means at Ballard Food Bank. One of our organization’s values is that we acknowledge we are stewards of the land. We aim to minimize our environmental footprint, promote sustainability, and support local farmers and communities to grow their own food. From the building itself to the food on our shelves, we’ve taken care to create a space that provides hope and support for our clients, as well as reflecting our commitment to the planet.
Natural light flows into the community market from the skylights above.
Our Home
The Ballard Food Bank building stands on a property that was formerly classified as a brownfield, an underutilized space with potential contamination. The clean-up and transformation of this lot into our Hub for Hope in 2021 is the starting point of a sustainability strategy that informed the construction and design of the whole space.
Fifteen solar panels adorn the roof of the building, generating 3400 watts of electricity. Inside, seventeen skylights bring in natural light - reducing the number and wattage of light inside while creating an open and welcoming space for shoppers. Energy efficient appliances also minimize our environmental footprint, and public bike racks encourage alternative transportation for staff, volunteers, and guests.
Our largest stormwater capture planter in the back lot.
Native plants and pollinating plants line the sidewalk around the building. Bio-retention planters capture and treat rainwater and stormwater runoff; the largest runs 60 feet along the parking lot, beneath the “What Feeds You” mural. Volunteers grow herbs and vegetables in an 18-planter P-Patch in the sunny northeast corner of the property. Veggies grown on site are harvested and cooked up into delicious meals in our Kindness Café and placed in the market for shoppers to take home.
Vegetables beginning to come up in the food bank garden.
Day-to-Day
We strive to minimize waste through our daily operations. In our warehouse, we collect and reuse donated paper grocery bags and egg cartons. We use paper bags every day both in the no-cost, community market for shoppers, and for our home delivery program. Sturdy, reusable plastic bags are filled with ready-to-eat items for “No-Cook” bags for guests without reliable access to a kitchen.
Volunteer Leslie double-bagging donated grocery bags in the Community Market.
In our Kindness Café, we’re able to utilize large quantities of donated items that don’t make it to our shelves, as well as food that’s beginning to overripen or become stale. For example, jumbo packages of premade items like egg salad or hummus can form the base of sandwiches, overripe bananas become banana bread, and bread turning stale can be transformed into savory bread pudding and other dishes. Our café team has also recently begun collecting excess vegetable trimmings to make stock for soups.
“In an area like Ballard where there’s an abundance of grocery stores, we have an opportunity to capture the imperfect or extra items that are still perfectly good to eat. And there’s a larger impact for everything we recover. Look at a crate of slightly dented or bruised apples – when that's utilized it's 40 fewer pounds of food waste, and aggregately over the long run, large amounts of carbon expenditure of a crop’s lifecycle being honored. And, to say nothing of budget spend saved and creating something delicious for the café from what was potentially waste." Morgan Keuler, Volunteer
Café volunteer Joe portions out pizza bread made from stale baguettes.
Most of the packaging for our Kindness Café is compostable, and we have tailored signage for café and warehouse items placed around the facility to help direct and educate our shoppers, volunteers, and staff on waste sorting. We partner with Ridwell to recycle plastic cling wrap we receive from pallets of groceries.
In addition, we’ve recently replaced our pen and paper tracking systems for in-kind donations and volunteer hours with digitized logs to reduce paper waste.
Sourcing Food
Much of the food in our community market comes from donations from neighborhood stores. Through our Food Recovery program, we collect food from 25 grocery and retail partners. In 2022, we recovered 836,040 pounds of food – including fresh produce, meat, baked goods and more. In recovering extra food from grocery stores, bakeries, and farmers, we’re not only ensuring our shoppers have a wide variety of choices, but we’re also keeping excess or soon-to-expire food from going to waste.
“In order to maintain a consistent inventory for customers, grocery stores have to buy in excess. So simply due to the logistics of running a grocery store, there is some inherent waste in the system. What is so cool, is that we are actually able to recover a lot of that food which would otherwise be thrown away, and use it as a part of our input stream. Food banks and their food recovery efforts, play a vital role in reducing a community’s food waste.”
We also receive donations year-round from farmers at Ballard Farmers Market through a partnership with Sustainable Ballard. Their team of market gleaners visits the market every Sunday, collecting donations of extra produce from farm vendors. Annually, this totals over 15,000 pounds of fresh, local, and often organic produce. This program ensures that all this fresh, peak-season produce doesn’t go to waste – and also means our produce bins are filled with a wide variety of nutritious fruits and vegetables year-round!
Volunteers Nat and Clinton with towers of produce in the food bank warehouse.
Neighborhood P-Patches also provide seasonal produce. In an inspiring cycle, volunteers collect overripe produce from the food bank then bring it to Ballard P-Patch. This produce waste is then used to create compost for fruits and vegetables grown specifically for the food bank!
As need continues to increase in our community, we are also purchasing more food. Through purchasing decisions, we work to support local farmers and communities. Produce for our Weekend Food for Kids program comes from Farmstand Local Foods, who provides distribution for local farmers. In partnership with PCC Community Markets, we also source fresh produce from Harvest Against Hunger.
What You Can Do
We are so appreciative of the community’s support! In honor of Earth Day, here are a few ideas for how your efforts can help us minimize our environmental footprint:
● Organize a collection of paper bags and cardboard egg cartons! Encourage your friends and neighbors to save their paper grocery bags! Every donated bag is one more we can reuse rather than purchase, allowing us to direct our more funds to food and hygiene supplies for our market shelves.
● Donate homegrown produce! We accept fruit and vegetables grown in backyard gardens and P-Patch plots. We love having a variety of items to offer our clients. For a schedule of the best times to drop off in-kind donations like food and bags, please click here.
● Volunteer to maintain our garden and landscape! As summer approaches, we’re looking for plant-savvy volunteers to weed, prune, and nurture the plants that surround the food bank. If this is you, reach out to our Volunteer Manager, Heidi Osborn for more information.
● Set up a recurring donation! Setting up a monthly gift to Ballard Food Bank is easy and can be changed at any time. Monthly donations help make sure we can do things like buy produce from local farms as well as buy compostable products, which aren’t always the cheapest option. Help us keep compostable packaging in our cafe by donating items we use regularly, or via a monthly gift!