In the historical city of St Albans, Hertfordshire, you can find The Refill Pantry, a store that allows shoppers to buy in bulk and ditch the plastic. Founder, Celina Mendoza, tells Chloé Valerie Harmsworth how she set up her sustainable shop and why the future is green.
I was inspired to open The Refill Pantry after reading a newspaper article in December 2017 about a zero-waste shop in Devon. I loved the concept and visited to see how it all worked. The idea was perfect – to source the most ethical and best-packaged wholefoods in bulk, and sell them on to customers in reusable containers, reducing tonnes of unnecessary packaging. I had spent years recycling fastidiously, but was frustrated by the amount of packaging that I was throwing away almost immediately from pasta, lentils, rice, nuts and seeds (items we now sell in the shop). I felt that St Albans city centre needed a shop like this and so threw myself into the mammoth task of finding a retail unit and starting a zero-waste store of my own.