Cast your mind back to the waste that you’ve produced in the last week, month, or even year. Try to picture all the food packaging, cosmetic products and clothing that you have purchased, then discarded. Even if you’re the strictest recycler going, chances are, you will have racked up quite a pile. But as 2018 well and truly exposed the harmful impact of plastic, more people are vowing to become zero-waste, and stores like Hetu are paving the way for a more wastefree life. Dodging unnecessary packaging and only using locally-sourced products can be a challenge, one that Laura Boyes was all too familiar with. Wanting to do better for the environment, and encourage others to follow suit, she decided to open Hetu, a vegan, zero-waste shop located in London.
Hetu offers whole foods in bulk, cleaning products on tap and sustainable, reusable items without unnecessary packaging – our philosophy is ‘planet and purpose over profit’. We apply the zero-waste business principles to everything we do. This includes commitment to the triple bottom line – social, environmental, financial – a zero to landfill policy and challenging ‘the waste, behind the waste’. For example, the store’s design was created with 80 per cent second-hand and upcycled pieces. Hetu was the first store in the UK to use plastic-free food dispensers and the first fully vegan, zero-waste shop in London.