Less Plastic, more Pasta

In 2018 the European Union calculated that the average EU citizen produces 178kg of packaging waste per year, most of which paper. This is everything from our online shopping packages to a box of pasta from the supermarket.

Sadly, the leader of this per-capita statistic is Germany with 227kg per person. Perhaps that is why Germany is a place with so many different solutions trying to get consumers to buy products involving a lot less waste.

One prominent solution are packaging free shops, which sell products from bulk containers from where you refill your own jars or bags, for instance with pasta. Now, having refill stores naturally is not a strictly digital innovation, but I personally think it is a very important one (after all, we will not substitute products like bread and soap with digital alternatives). One of the first stores in Europe, Original Unverpackt, perhaps unsurprisingly founded in Berlin in 2014, even sells courses on how to open a zero packaging shop or delivery service. Below you can see a short video about their concept.

These stores are usually small and sell a few hundred products, paling in comparison to the tens of thousands an average supermarket carries. However, part of being sustainable is also reducing the number of unnecessary things, and who said we really need 12 different mayonnaise containers from 5 different brands in every supermarket? That is why refill stores normally sell one or at most only very few varieties of a product, an option that is usually organic and local. However, some like to think (slightly) bigger, like the Italian franchise Negozioleggero, which has already 16 stores! There, and in their e-shop, they sell 1.500 different groceries, home and personal care products.

Because of their small size and since they try to keep their offer as sustainable as possible, these shops are often more expensive than other stores, so they are currently not addressing the needs of large parts of consumers. Still, they obviously need to start somewhere, and I personally see it as a very bold step to open a business that may be very celebrated by many, but does not represent that daily shopping destination for the large majority of us. Here you can find a map of many packaging-free stores across Europe, while the website Litterless lists packaging-free shops across the United States here.

Currently, zero packaging shops are generally found in trendy neighborhoods and are more of a niche of the grocery market. However, also larger corporations are finally starting to hear this need from the consumer (and the planet). Since October 2020 the German drugstore Rossman has introduced refill stations in five of its stores as a pilot project. There, consumers can refill bottles of four different soaps of the Henkel brand "Love Nature" multiple times. Similar projects are also being carried out in selected stores of other large chains, like the drugstores DM and Müller and the supermarket Rewe. Here is map giving an overview of the German stores that are part of this initiative. This shows that finally also the bigger, more mainstream chains and brands are starting to move in the right, i.e. less polluting direction in terms of packaging.

What is the impact of this?

• The impact that these stores have can be measured the best when go you there yourself since every purchase made there avoided a tin can, a cardboard box or a plastic packaging to be brought out into your home.

• For example, according to Love Nature's homepage, already 10.597 bottles were refilled at the stations across Germany. And this was just for 4 products, for less than 4 months, in about 30 stores.

What can you do?

• Naturally, nobody will completely shift their shopping from supermarkets to zero packaging stores overnight. Supermarkets are still much too convenient from a price and all-in-one-store perspective. However, I encourage you to visit your local store and try to see if there are some products that you could get there regularly instead of buying them packaged in the supermarket. Especially for cheaper food items like rice or legumes, it is not even a more expensive option.

• If you like, share this article and on social media and follow us on Instagram.

• You could also sign a petition, like this one from a high school in Zurich, urging companies to reduce their plastic production.