It sells everything you could ever need for a great meal. There’s only one catch — it won’t give you anything to take it all home in. If you ever catch yourself looking at the kitchen bin guiltily, with its huge pile of plastic packets, cardboard containers and wrappers, you might be interested to know there’s a whole movement that aims to go one better than even recycling: precycling, or cutting out packaging in the first place. Among those at the forefront of this consumer, revolution is Packageless, a first-of-its-kind shop that avoids all packaging and invites you to provide your own containers to stock up on essentials such as flour, cereals, nuts, pasta, rice and lentils.
Simply weigh your container when you arrive so it can be deducted from the overall weight and then get filling. Not only will you save money, but by foregoing packaging, you’ll reduce the amount of material waste being either sent to landfills or incinerated. In its large store in Hackney, East London, Packageless offers a wide range of products, as well as a bar and café, run by Kate de Syllas, a well-known local chef.
She started out doing market stalls specializing in eco products and a small range of whole foods and nuts. ‘I wanted to see how people reacted. Would they bring their own containers and refill?’ Conway says. ‘It did really well and we ended up with two market stalls, but it was a bit impractical lugging all the stuff around.’ The company has a clear philosophy that includes sourcing organic, fair-trade products where possible, supporting artisan local producers and applying the principles of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ to all parts of its operation.
As well as using unsold produce in the café, it uses black tiles with erasable white wax pencils instead of printing off labels for products. It even has a solution for that most eco-unfriendly product, the takeaway paper coffee cup, with its ‘The 1000 Cup Countdown’ scheme. Packageless has promised to provide 1000 biodegradable cups, each of which comes complete with a REID (radio frequency identification) tag that will tell you more about the company’s aims and if returned, will earn you a free coffee.
‘We want to be the local store,’ Conway says. ‘We want them to come here rather than go to a supermarket.’
But at the moment Packageless finds its dedicated customers are travelling from all over. ‘They’re coming for the atmosphere as much as what we’re trying to do.’
‘The whole point is to take people on a journey with you,’ Conway says. ‘If someone comes in and they’re not green and they don’t have any containers, I don’t want to say that I won’t serve them, because they go away with such an awful view of what we do. Whereas if we say that this time we’ll provide them with a small paper bag and next time they can bring their own, then it takes them two or three goes and they’ll end up bringing their own.’