In 2018, fresh home from travels abroad, we packed a stack of containers and visited our first refill shop, Zero Green in Bristol. The act of diligently filling them with cereals, nuts, snacks and cleaning products may seem like a small step, but to us, it felt like shopping wouldn’t ever be the same again. There was no unnecessary food waste, no excess packaging, and no pressure to buy more than we actually need. This was a revolution; if we could shop like this all the time, we could reduce our household waste to almost zero. There was one problem, though: Bristol was a 160-mile round trip for us, so we didn’t go there all that often. To make this work, we needed somewhere closer, and that just didn’t exist… yet.
Fast forward to now, and we have the largest refill shop in Oxfordshire, selling over 1,800 ethically sourced products.
Rows of refill dispensers at Nothing But Footprints, Banbury. Customers can buy exactly what they need, reducing both food waste and the mountains of single-use packaging that accompany conventional supermarket shopping.
So, what exactly is a refill shop?
Refill shops are essentially supermarkets, but without the packaging. They will buy products in bulk and sell them loose, allowing customers to buy as much or as little as they like. You only pay for what you take, and you only take what you need, making it a great way to shop on a budget.
Product ranges vary across shops, but you can usually expect to find dry foods such as cereals, pasta, and rice, as well as herbs and spices, alongside refillable cleaning products and body care items. Some shops will also stock a range of plastic-free household items from bamboo toothbrushes to natural soaps.
What made you want to start refilling?
During my travels a few years prior to our trip to Bristol, I remember one moment that stayed in my mind. I was diving in a Protected Marine Park, about 50 km off the coast of Malaysia, when something moved across the surface above us. At first, we thought it was a boat, but knowing that we were diving below, boats shouldn’t be moving in the area. When we finished our dive and surfaced, we realised that the ‘boat’ was in fact a king-size mattress! Paired with the sightings of discarded fishing nets, engine parts from boats, and even tyres that we had just seen strewn across the reef, this really hit home just how big the problem of dealing with waste had become.
On my return to the UK, I decided that I wanted to make a real effort to reduce my personal footprint on the world, so I started shopping with this in mind.
Dan Ludlow, owner of Nothing But Footprints in Banbury, speaks with Jake from Water Matters during a visit to Oxfordshire's largest refill store, which stocks more than 1,800 ethically sourced products
Some things were relatively easy to switch; finding loose fruit and veg was straightforward for most things, although salad leaves and cucumbers proved tricky. We found a fair-trade shop in Oxford that would refill our cleaning products (I worked in Oxford at the time). Others proved far more elusive, and for products that would keep long enough, I would simply buy in bulk instead. Eventually, I discovered that refill shops were popping up in the South West, so when we booked tickets to see a band in Bristol, we knew we had to tie in a trip to one of them.
Why should we care about waste?
Every year, we each produce over 400kg of waste in the UK. Included within that are around 200 plastic bottles per person! Packaging waste has a huge impact on the environment, in the energy, water, and materials used to create it, in its transportation, and finally in the collection, sorting, and (hopefully) recycling of it. Plastic has quickly become a massive problem of its own, not just by clogging up our rivers and oceans, but also by microplastics now found in the water we drink, our own blood, and even the placenta. I don’t think it would be too dramatic to suggest that plastic is one of the biggest problems currently facing human and planetary health.
Every person in the UK generates more than 400kg of waste each year, according to Dan Ludlow. Refill shopping helps tackle the problem at its source by preventing unnecessary packaging from entering the waste stream in the first place.
What made you decide to open your own refill shop?
We had been talking about opening a shop of our own for a while. I worked in retail management for just over a decade before I went on my travels, so I knew how to run a shop, but I didn’t know the first thing about setting up and running a food business. We did a lot of research, chatted to people who had started their own, visited shops, and slowly a plan formed. We did our first market in May 2019, and the shop has grown week by week ever since!
What’s changed since then, and what do you think the future looks like?
In short, everything has changed! When we started there were only really a handful of physical shops trading, most of us started out with market stalls or online, so it was still really difficult to shop regularly at a refill shop. There were also just a handful of suppliers making suitable products, so we would often see the same products in most refill shops.
Since then, there has been an explosion of new shops up and down the country, including a couple of franchises in and around London, which is really encouraging. We’ve also seen some of the major supermarkets taking part in refill trials, where they have banished packaging from sections of their shops, some more successfully than others. Alongside this, there is now a huge range of suppliers and products to choose from, filling almost every niche. This has meant that it is now possible to find alternatives to almost any plastic product in the home, giving customers choice and making the experience much more personalised.
Refill shops are about far more than pasta and rice. From washing-up liquid and laundry detergent to hand soap and cleaning vinegar, many everyday products normally sold in disposable plastic bottles can be bought as refills, helping households cut waste without changing their routines
The rise of sustainable products has (finally) caught the attention of the big brands, too, as we saw last year when Wild Deodorants was bought by Unilever for over £200m. Whilst some in the industry saw this as a betrayal of their ethics, I thought it showed that sustainability is at last being taken seriously.
How can I get started?
Refill shops can seem intimidating at first. We get lots of people who are scared to spill everything on the floor! Each shop has a slightly different way of doing things, but I’m yet to find a refill shop that doesn’t have a friendly face on hand to show you the ropes.
My one piece of advice would be not to try to do it all at once. Start small. Commit to never buying a washing-up liquid bottle again, and just take that in to refill. It’s such a satisfying feeling to know that you aren’t adding to the huge piles of waste we create every day.
This week being the ‘Big Green Week’ seems like the perfect time to start!
Editor’s Note
As Dan explains in this article, small changes can make a big difference. Whether it is refilling a bottle of washing-up liquid, buying loose pasta, or reusing containers that would otherwise be thrown away, refill shopping offers a practical way to cut waste and reduce our environmental footprint.
If you would like to find a refill store near you, visit the national refill directory at https://www.refill.org.uk/about/.
Readers in Oxfordshire can learn more about Dan Ludlow's award-winning Banbury refill store, Nothing But Footprints, at https://www.refillnotlandfill.co.uk/.
Want to see the scale of the challenge? The UK's live landfill clock provides a real-time estimate of the amount of waste being sent to landfill across the country and is a powerful reminder of why reducing waste at source matters: https://britclock.co.uk/environment/landfill/.
