On Earth Day in 2014, mother-and-daughter team Sandee Ferman and Callie Milford launched No Tox Life with homemade vegan soaps that they would sell at L.A.-area farmers markets and pop-ups.

In the years that passed, their business grew and they learned a lot in the process. They opened a brick-and-mortar in Glassell Park, developed more products, like the popular Dish Block, a bar soap for your kitchen, and moved towards more sustainable packaging practices. This past Earth Day, they unveiled a refill station inside the shop, where customers can bring their own jars to stock up on everything from body lotion to household cleaners.

“It was something that a lot of our customers had been asking about,” says Ferman.

And it was an instant hit.

The concept is simple: You can either buy a jar or bring one from home. (On Instagram, No Tox Life has a tutorial for sanitizing jars.) You weigh the empty containers, then fill them with whatever you need. Body lotion, laundry soap, witch hazel and baking soda are just some of the essentials you’ll find here. When you’re done, the containers are weighed again and you pay for the contents. It’s a way to keep your home stocked in cleaning and personal care products without the single-use plastics.

Recently, refill stations have been gaining steam in Los Angeles and Orange County’s retail scene, thanks to a few savvy and environmentally conscious business owners catering to customers who want to reduce waste at home.

For Julie Darrell, founder of Bring Your Own Long Beach, her refill station began with a personal mission. “We had already made the switch to reusable grocery bags, reusable water bottles. I felt like there was another step that we could take beyond the steps that we had already mastered,” she says by phone. But Darrell realized how difficult it was to find personal care products without packaging. “That’s where I thought, I can’t be the only one looking for this.”

She started Bring Your Own Long Beach with pop-ups at local farmers’ markets in 2017. Then she met the people from Algalita Marine Research and Education, a Long Beach-based non-profit that raises awareness about plastic-related pollution. They joined forces to open the first BYO Long Beach store inside Algalita’s gift shop in the fall of that year. Darrell has since opened a second location in downtown Long Beach. She also participates in community events to help raise awareness on how people can cut down waste at home. The goal, she says, is to make waste reduction “approachable” for people. “There’s never a pressure to be zero waste. We’re working towards it as an end goal,” she explains. “I like to call it low waste or intentional living.”

There’s more to low-waste stores than the refill stations. These are also spaces where you can find everything from stainless steel straws to bamboo toothbrushes. Store owners are doing the research for consumers, finding companies with ethical and environmentally sound practices. For the refill stations, there’s an added challenge in procuring sources who can fill bulk orders. Whenever possible, stores like these will turn to local companies. “That’s ideal and that’s how we change the system,” says Leslie Campbell, owner of Sustain L.A. in Highland Park. “Systems are so spread out that the average item or food in the grocery store travels 2300 miles before it lands in your store. That’s not sustainable.”

Campbell has spent a decade spreading the word on sustainable practices, beginning in the restaurant industry. Her Sustain L.A. refill station began with pop-ups in 2018 and evolved into a store by mid-2019. She says that the movement towards sustainability and zero waste has certainly grown, but there’s still room for improvement, particularly when it comes to accessibility to lower-waste resources for all communities. “That’s something else that we need to work on is making this more accessible to everyone and starting small,” she says. “Small steps add up, and you look at your progress and it’s been a lot.”

In Orange County, Thea Merritt is working on bringing low-waste solutions to locals. Fullerton-based Merritt had been reducing her own waste by making items like produce bags, cleansing pads and utensil pouches. About a year ago, she started selling those at local farmers markets. By fall of 2019, she had opened her own shop, Eco Now, at The Lab in Costa Mesa. “The goal was always to have a store because I want it to be consistent and I want people to have a place to go to where they could have conversations about zero waste and have resources available for them too,” Merritt says.

The first question Merritt is often asked is “I can bring any container?” The answer is yes.

“People get really excited about it,” she says. “They bring whatever container they can find, their peanut butter jar, their ceramic soap containers and have fun with it.” Merritt is hopeful about what changes refill stations can bring to communities. “If we have these available everywhere, it would change the ways that consumers think and act,” she says.

Over at No Tox Life, Callie Milford says that she would like to see refill stations as a “normal” part of shopping. “I would like to see major grocery stores set up sections that have refills,” she says.

Getting to that point, though, will take a lot of effort, not just from these small business owners, but from consumers who can put the pressure on larger companies to reevaluate their practices. “There is a lot of potential here,” says Eco Now’s Merritt. “We have a lot issues to take care of right now, but we also have a lot of solutions.”