This survey is a check-in and evaluation for our community to assess how the COVID-19 related changes in consumer public health protections have affected your conservation efforts, habits and perspectives, and to see what new workarounds you’ve come up with.

Background: Oregon’s Department of Agriculture (ODA) and the FDA have issued COVID-related recommendations for grocers encouraging them to temporarily eliminate food service stations that use shared utensils. Their recommendation leaves open to interpretation what customer-facing surfaces are safe or unsafe, and has led grocery stores to implement varying measures to protect public health. At the same time, CDC studies have found that virus transmission occurs primarily through close person-to-person contact, and virus transmission from infected surfaces has been extremely low.

The survey should take 5 to 10-minute survey and information will be used to inform next steps in their waste-reduction advocacy efforts.