How to Reduce Your Waste by Refilling
Love My Mat is collaborating with Park Market & Refillery! For the month of February 2022 you can purchase our eco-friendly yoga & meditation props at Park while shopping for other eco-conscious household items.
Erika and I sat down to chat about the importance of reducing our waste in every aspect of our daily lives. Below she shares her thoughts on how easy it can be when you know where to shop.
Reduce Your Waste by Refilling
There are countless ways to bring environmentally conscious behaviours into our day-to-day living. It could be opting to ride a bike to run an errand or making your tea at home instead of grabbing one in a disposable cup. If you’ve started or want to start integrating more behaviours like these into daily life and live in a more earth-friendly way, visiting a refillery might be a great next step for you to take!
Think about the packaging your dish soap, popcorn, avocado oil and shampoo come in. Most often these are found in single-use, plastic packaging destined for landfill. Even if we toss these containers into the blue bin in hopes of them being recycled, the sad reality is that only 9% of plastic waste generated by Canadians is actually being recycled. What happens to the rest? The vast majority is destined for landfill, as well as ending up in the natural environment, being sent overseas or incinerated. This is bad news. However, there is some good news - there is a better way!
Ever heard of a refillery? It is exactly as it sounds, a place for refilling containers/vessels you already have with household home, body and food products. This allows you, the consumer, to shift from a linear model of consumption (buy, use, throw away) to a circular one, where reducing waste and reusing existing containers is placed at the forefront. Besides the environmental benefits of shopping at a refillery, there also comes so much variety and flexibility in the shopping experience. In the case of Park Market & Refillery, which we’ll touch on further down, refillable products are priced by weight. This means you can try as much (or as little) as you’d like, which prevents being stuck with a new plastic container filled with product you don’t really love.
If refilling sounds like something you may be interested in, Park Market & Refillery is a refillery in Burlington. They offer in-store shopping, pop-ups, as well as local delivery to Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville and Mississauga. They have over 100 refillable products, ranging from dish soap and laundry detergent, to coffee beans and flax seeds, to essential oils and so much more. The process is very straightforward - simply bring your clean & dry containers into the shop, and tell them what product you’d like. They’ll weigh the container, tare the scale, fill up your container with product and weigh it again - meaning you’re paying just for the weight of the product and none of the packaging.
On top of refillable products, they also carry a number of sustainable lifestyle goods. If you’re looking to ditch your plastic toothbrush, deodorant or floss - they’ve got a low waste solution available. They wrote a Refilling 101 blog, where they list some helpful tips and tricks for those interested in refilling!
written by Erika Minkhorst
Owner and founder of Park Market & Refillery
