Refill stores also supply dry goods for which you can take your own container or paper bags, or use the bags they provide. Goods available include spices (whole and ground), sugars and flours, rice, seeds, pulses, nuts, dried fruit, pasta, oats and other cereals, cocoa, etc.
Shopping in this way cuts down on most or all packaging and allows us to pursue the ideal of zero waste. Refill stores often stock unpackaged bars of soap, deodorant etc. They equally often sell zero plastic options such as copper wire pan scrubbers, bamboo tooth brushes, rubber gloves, wooden dish mops etc.
Refill stores offer more than just refills of detergents. At the Source I regularly take jars and bottles to fill up with peanut butter, tahini, maple syrup, soy sauce, and olive oil. (I’m still hoping that this will extend to yeast extract!) And as previously mentioned, I can now buy coffee beans from a refill point at the local Artisan café.
Refilling reduces the cost – financial and ecological – of packaging. It is interesting to reflect in why we need packaging.
Milk and More are supply “Fill” laundry and washing liquids in return and refill bottles. There are an increasing number of shops that offer a refill service for soapy liquids for laundry, dishes and bodies – just take along an empty bottle to fill. Locally we have Apple and Bees in Sheen Lane and the Source Store in Richmond. And if it’s bikes you are cleaning, the London Cycle Workshop has a refill point for bike wash detergent.
Why not find out where your local refill outlets are?
Next Friday, 16th June, is World Refill Day – ‘a global day of action to prevent plastic pollution and help people live with less waste. Together with our partners and supporters around the world, we’re building a global movement, inspiring action and demonstrating that the world is ready for a refill and reuse revolution.’
There are simple ways we can all get involved.
Use a refillable water bottle. The trick is to remember to take it with you!
Why pay for water? Tap water in the UK is safe to drink and largely free – there are water refill points at all mainline railway stations, there are refill points in the streets provided by local authorities (eg Bath, London), and most cafes will happily refill your bottle. Why pay for a plastic bottle that will be used once and may not be recycled? (About 40% of these bottles are not recycled).
The United Nations Environment Programme is called on all countries to reduce their plastic consumption by 80% by 2040. Plastics are problem items because they are made from oil and thus come with an inbuilt unsustainable carbon footprint, and because much of the plastic is not recycled and instead causes pollution – especially in marine areas.
To cut our use of plastics, we will need to cut our dependency on plastic packaging. Our local cafe which also has its own coffee roasting business now supplies beans packaging free. The beans are stored in silos and you simply decant them into your own container (the cafe also sell reusable tins). Simple!
Carry a keep cup and/ or a water bottle. We can help cafés avoid using throwaway cups by having our own ready to hand. (My preference is to sit in with a china cup but there are times when that is not possible!) There are some takeaway outlets that will fill you lunch box rather than supplying a throwaway container – https://www.refill.org.uk/
There are more and more places – including most main railway stations – where you can refill water bottles avoiding the need to pay for water in a single use plastic bottle.
According to the London Borough of Richmond’s web site, plastic is recycled as follows:-
After initial sorting first in Twickenham and then in Mansfield Derbyshire, plastics are transported for further sorting at a plant in Leeds: this plant separates high Density Polyethylene (HDPE) and Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET, a type of polyester) bottles from PET pots, tubs and trays and any plastic films present.
HDPE plastic flakes are recycled in either UK or Belgium becoming injection moulded products including plastic packaging and containers, and cable protection covers.
Mixed plastic bottles are recycled in Turkey, Germany, and Spain where they maybe recycled into plastic bags and other plastic products.
PET bottles are recycled as fresh bottles.
Pots, tubs and food trays are recycled in the UK or else where in Europe where they may become imitation wood products e.g. garden furniture and other plastic products
Only PET bottles are solely recycled here in the UK, having been on quite a journey around England. These PET bottles are recycled as new plastic bottles – known as closed loop recycling. This is not to say that we should rush out and buy drinks in PET bottles. How many of the plastic bottles on the shelves are actually made of recycled plastic (rPET)? Most still are made from virgin plastic.
Consider the alternatives. You could refill your own refill bottle from the tap which would be both economical and ecological. You could be given the option of buying a drink in a refillable glass or plastic bottle, perhaps one with a deposit to encourage reuse. (Heavy duty PET bottles can be refilled as per a glass milk bottle).
Greenpeace is petitioning the Government on the following points.
Set a target for eliminating single use plastics by 2037 and halving such use by 2025. (There would be exemptions such as for medical items).
Ban on the export of plastic recycling by 2025, including an immediate ban on their export to non OECD countries.
Implement a deposit return scheme for bottles
Moratorium on expanding incineration capacity in the UK.
*We can contact our local council and ask for them to reconsider where their plastic recycling goes. We can ask them to ban single use plastics within their organisation.
*We can contact manufacturers and suppliers and ask them to reduce single use plastic, ditto cafes and food outlets.
We can avoid single use plastics by using our own keep cup/ flask for coffee etc, water bottle for drinks, sandwich box for pack lunches etc
*We can simply not buy things that use or come packed in plastic.
The more people use refillable water bottles, the less demand there will be for bottled water. The hot weather has reminded us of the importance of staying hydrated – can it also instil in us the habit of carrying a refillable bottle. Lots of cafes have taps or jugs of water for refills, many railway stations have water refill points, and there are a growing number of public water fountains around the country.
Refill has an app to help you find places to refill water bottles, cafes that give discounts for reusable cups, and places that will refill your lunch box (but not for free!) – https://www.refill.org.uk/
What does sustainability look like in daily life? I thought I would share our (that’s me and my husband) experiences. What we cook and eat and where we shop, has been shaped by three principles.
L is for local: locally produced food, which can include things grown or produced in one’s immediate locality and things where local can mean the UK rather than abroad. For example in East Sheen we can buy honey that comes from Richmond Park. We can buy coffee beans roasted across the river in Chiswick. We can have breakfast in Putney enjoying porridge or eggs Benedict made on the premises. We can choose to buy strawberries from Kent as opposed to imported from Spain. Equally we can eat strawberries grown in our back garden. We buy beans and pulses, seeds and grains such as quinoa, from Hodmedod whose produce is all UK grown.
O is for organic: organic food has a less damaging impact on the planet than non organic food. Indeed it’s effect can be positive, with soils improved with vegetable matter rather than being stripped of its micro-organisms by fertilisers, with pollinators encouraged rather than being killed by pesticides, with livestock well cared for rather than being routinely treated with antibiotic prophylactics. We buy organically grown oats, and flour that comes from farms in Cambridgeshire and which is milled in a windmill!
A is for animal friendly: animals that live as near a natural life as possible (often organically raised). If we buy eggs for my husband we opt for free range, organic ones (although at the moment no eggs are free range owing to restrictions around bird flu). At Christmas the festive bird for my husband is a cockerel that has enjoyed a whole year of life unlike most of chicken meat which comes from birds that live may be 6 – 8 weeks (up to 12 for organically raised birds).
F is for fairly traded: the Fair Trade mark is well known as measure where production has guaranteed a price above the market minimum, where the work force receive fair wages and where provision is made for services such as schooling and health care. We buy fair trade bananas, chocolate and tea which are now widely available. We buy coffee beans that have been ethically sourced from small scale producers who grow top quality beans, appreciating that the higher cost reflects their value.
2. Secondly we avoid excess and plastic packaging, a habit we learnt through a zero waste experiment. We buy dried fruit and nuts, and dry goods such as rice, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda, spices, sugar, cocoa, millet and polenta from local refill stores where goods are dispensed into paper bags – often ones we have brought to reuse. We also buy refills of olive oil, soy sauce, maple syrup, tahini and peanut butter, taking our own jars and bottles to refill. Milk – both oat and dairy – comes in reused glass bottles on the milk round. Since we cook meals from scratch we avoid lots of single use plastic boxes. Likewise making our own cakes and biscuits reduces the amount of waste we generate. Jam jars are reused when we make jam, marmalade and chutneys and when we bottle summer fruits. Deliveries from Hodmedod come in paper or compostable bags, flour and oats come in bulk in paper sacks.
3. Thirdly we seek to reduce the carbon footprint of what we eat. Most meals are vegan – Paul enjoys cheese in his sandwiches and dairy milk on his cereal. A vegan diet can save in the region 400 and 900 kgCO2 a year. Even with a vegan diet there are ways of being more or less carbon efficient. By choosing locally produced food, food that is in season and cutting back on food waste (other vegetable leaves, tea bags and coffee grounds all go into the compost bin whilst apple cores go to make cider vinegar) we aim to minimise our carbon footprint. We have a weekly fruit and vegetable delivery from OddBox which collects fruit and vegetables from farmers and suppliers that would otherwise go to waste – because supermarket demand has dropped, crops have been larger (or sometimes smaller) than expected), crops have ripened too quickly/ slowly, or items are too small/ big/ misshapen for general sale. OddBox by preventing food from going to waste, saves some 11,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
Another refill? Did you know that Lush make their black plastic pots from recycled plastic and that each one that is returned, goes to their own reprocessing facility to be remade into a new pot ready to be filled again. And for each one returned 50p is paid back! Lush calls this ‘packaging as a service’!
Sadly only about 15% of pots are returned. It sounds as if we consumers need to be more proactive participants of the circular economy.
The Green Tau 