Your reusable bag at Ray’s helps charities, environment
Bend Bulletin, March 24, 2009. By Anna Sowa.
Grocery shoppers who bring their reusable shopping bags to the checkout are already rewarded at many stores with a few cents off their entire bill. But now, one store is phasing in a program in which those bags will mean donations to local environmental programs. Ray’s Food Place stores in Central Oregon are the first grocery stores in the nation to partner with a program called EcoUnit, which rewards the use of reusable shopping bags with donations to an environmental charity. “We’re trying to (reduce) our carbon footprint, as a company,” said Robin Kovach, director of sustainability and environmental impact with C&K Market Inc., the Brookings-based parent company of Ray’s Food Place. Previously, Ray’s shoppers received a 5-cent discount on each reusable shopping bag they brought in to use at the store. Since the beginning of March, shoppers also have had the option of using those bag credits for the EcoUnit program: each bag is worth one EcoUnit credit, and after you’ve collected enough credits, you can choose which environmental program to support.
Other grocery store chains are promoting reusable shopping bags and rewarding customers with raffles and discounts, but Ray’s appears to be the first with the environmental-program points. In Central Oregon, participants can donate to a tree-planting project in the Deschutes River Basin and a river restoration project on the Lower John Day, said Kent Ragen, CEO of EcoUnit, which is based in the Bay Area. Shoppers who choose to participate will receive a receipt instructing them on how to go online to register with the EcoUnit program and then monitor their points accumulation. The Ray’s Web site says 50 EcoUnit credits equates to one tree planted. “Our goal is to change the behaviors of consumers,” EcoUnit’s Ragen said. “The program is designed to take the cost that we would otherwise be incurring in the form of paper and plastic bags and shift it toward the local environment.”
Eventually, if shoppers approve of the program, C&K will consider dropping the 5-cent discount option, Kovach said.
So far, shoppers are responding well and participating in the EcoUnits program. At the Ray’s Food Place in Sisters, assistant store manager Allen Lampman said a few people are deterred by the effort to go online to monitor points, but the majority approve of it. “If you still want your nickel, we’ll give it to you,” C&K’s Kovach said, “but we want to encourage people to put it toward a larger cause. Everybody feels good about that.” Kovach says C&K Market hopes to eventually extend the program to its other stores, as a part of its continuing effort to be a more Earth-friendly company.
Anna Sowa can be reached at 541-383-0304 or asowa@bendbulletin.com.
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