Shana Novak / WIRED

The stores often look similar: sparse rows of glass jars containing dry foods like pasta and lentils, refill stations for green cleaning solutions and wax paper-wrapped vegan cheese. These plastic-free, zero-waste shops — which include Bulk Market and Harmless in London, and Refill Store in Truro, Cornwall — are a utopia for people looking to ditching single-use plastics, and have even inspired (or shamed) some larger retailers into following their lead and cutting down on packaging.

But does bringing your own plastic boxes or glass jars make much of a difference in the fight against plastic, emissions and other environmental sins? It’s complicated.


Using reusable containers has benefits; it avoids the environmental costs of manufacturing and disposing of single-use plastic packaging and reduces littering. "I think that's one of the reasons it's attractive to people, because it seems to solve all those problems,” says Simon Aumônier, principal partner at Environmental Resources Management (ERM). “The issue is it's not always as simple as that.”

Measuring the impact of plastic-free shops is complex, as issues such as plastics recycling, food waste and transport confound the benefits. And while ditching plastic is beneficial in many respects, the overall environmental impact can be small compared to other choices, such as reducing meat consumption. Here's how to make the most of shopping plastic-free, and why it matters what you buy, where you buy it, and how you carry it home.

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Bring your own box

Plastic-free stores require shoppers to bring their own reusable containers (or buy them in-store) in which to ferry home their pasta, nuts and other dry goods. Shunning single-use plastic means it doesn't end up in landfill or choking a turtle. "Every time you use your own container, you're cutting down the amount of plastic you would have been responsible for," says Clare Oxborrow, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth.

However, as with the plastic bag versus reusable tote debate, it matters what you use in place of the single-use plastic packaging, and how often you use it. There are no exact figures, as it depends on the packaging being replaced and what it's being swapped with, but the more often reusable replacements are used, the better. "Replacing a piece of single-use plastic packaging with a Tupperware container means you've got maybe ten times the material — therefore you need to reuse it maybe ten or 20 or 100 times before it's a better solution in material consumption terms," says Aumônier.


But while reusable plastic containers can be durable and light, they also stain and crack. "Glass and metal are more robust for the long term and can often then be recycled at the end of their life much more easily than plastic can," says Oxborrow. "Because of the way the system is set up, only about nine per cent of plastic ever made has been recycled. I think we need to move away from this mentality that recycling is the solution. We have to stop using so much plastic in the first place.”

Glass and metal products are, however, heavy and emissions-intensive to make and transport – so again, you need to re-use them many, many times to really gain the environmental benefit.

Avoid food waste

There is a reason single-use plastic is used for packaging: it works. One study shows that cucumbers wrapped in plastic stay fresh for up to two weeks longer than ‘naked’ ones. And a cucumber that gets chucked in the compost bin is a waste of water and transport (and related emissions), regardless of how it was packaged.

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Whether you can opt for plastic-free fruit and veg depends on how often you shop, says Helen Bird, resource management specialist at WRAP. If you have time to shop daily, it's easier to go plastic-free than if you do a couple of big shops a month. "We definitely need to move towards how we can think more about reuse and going packaging free, but in ways that are supportive of the lifestyles we've evolved do, such as with women working," she says. If you can’t shop regularly, feel no guilt if you buy the plastic-wrapped cucumber — it's better environmentally and financially to make it last longer than have it go to waste.


Food waste also happens in stores. It's irritating to see apples plonked in cardboard protectors and wrapped in plastic, but that prevents waste. ERM consulted with Marks & Spencer on that very issue a few years back, says Aumônier. “Packaged apples don't get damaged, and loose apples do because people pick them up and put them back and they roll onto the floor and get bruised." That leads to spoiled food.

Indeed, there's a reason so many plastic-free stores focus on dry goods. Pasta, nuts and the like have a longer shelf-life, so are less likely to be wasted once brought home, and less likely to get damaged in store. Do-it-yourself refill stations can lead to waste too, though; Aumônier admits he sometimes spills beer when topping up at the refill station in his local Waitrose in Oxford, which is selling 160 items without packaging as part of a trial scheme. "But beer has a fairly low footprint, so even if a little bit spills or is wasted, it's not going to counterbalance the benefits, as far as I can see," he says.

Alternative packaging materials

Packaging has other benefits beyond avoiding food waste. We use it to communicate use-by dates, nutritional information and cooking instructions. But other single-use materials are available.

Biodegradable plastics are seen as one solution, but Bird warns they aren't necessarily as green as they may seem, as they also require fossil fuels to produce and often aren't actually compostable. "To a large degree, the infrastructure that we have in place at the moment in the UK is not set up to make those plastics actually compost," she says – meaning they end up in landfill or are incinerated.

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Budgens in Thornton swapped paper for plastic bags on bread, Bird notes, but that led to problems as shoppers couldn't see what they were buying. Sales slumped — who wants to buy a loaf they can't leer at? — and customers took bread out of the packaging to view it, leading to more wastage. The supermarket has now found the right balance, with one store offering 1,700 plastic-free products, showing alternatives can be found.

Keep it local

Plastic-free stores are usually locally-run businesses, and stock locally-produced food. While that has social benefits, whether local production has environmental benefits depends on the food in question.

Transport is rarely the biggest part of food's environmental impact, notes Aumônier. Larger stores have the benefit of efficiencies of scale, but local production can help cut down on the amount of packaging needed and avoid wastage. "Local could be better, but it isn't necessarily," he says.

How you get to the store also matters. If you're walking or taking the bus to a local zero-waste store, you're doing it right; if you're driving an hour to refill your laundry detergent — as one genius did with the Waitrose that's trialling refill stations, according to Aumônier — then you are doing it very wrong. "I'd rather suspect that the additional impacts of their travel, even if it was an electric vehicle, is probably a lot greater than the saving made by not using disposable packaging," Aumônier says.

There's another reason to avoid the big stores: they are actively trying to get shoppers to buy more, pushing buy-one-get-one-free offers and using other marketing techniques to encourage spending on unnecessary items. Smaller zero-waste stores are more sparse, but you're not going to be fooled into buying lima beans unless you really want them. "How many times do you go into a big supermarket and come out with a load of stuff simply because it was on offer or you've been sucked into their marketing — that encourages waste," Oxborrow says. "If you only wanted one head of lettuce and buy three bags, it'll get chucked away."

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Local, simpler shopping doesn't require a zero-waste store, of course — old-fashioned local butchers and greengrocers also fit the bill, though many high streets now lack them. "A lot of them shut down because they can't compete with the supermarkets," notes Oxborrow. And that means we get into cars and drive to buy plastic-wrapped cucumbers instead.

Watch what you buy

Many plastic-free stores are vegetarian or vegan, and with good reason: reducing or entirely cutting out meat and dairy likely has a bigger impact than whether you reuse the packaging or not. "The carbon impact of meat production is pretty devastating," says Bird.

Smaller, plastic-free shops and corner-store grocers have less variety than a giant supermarket on the edge of town, not least because you don't get strawberries in winter without plastic. Sarah Laidler, an analyst at the Carbon Trust, notes it's best to buy locally grown and in-season, and to eat fruits and vegetables quickly so packaging isn't required. "But vegetables don't account for the bulk of carbon emissions in most people's diets."

And then there's processing. Those jars of dry beans and other ingredients are light to transport and easy to store, but require home cooking. Aumônier points to chickpeas. Buying them dry saves on transport as they're lighter, but soaking them and cooking them at home is less efficient than when done on a mass scale by experts. "If you cook it in a saucepan with too much water and you over boil and throw some away, you're almost certain to be more impactful on the environment than if you bought canned chickpeas in the first place," he says.

Rather than try to calculate the merits of canned chickpeas versus dry, it makes more sense to make changes we know work, says Aumônier, such as only boiling the amount of water needed for a cup of tea and putting a lid on a saucepan to keep heat escaping. "These things can dramatically multiply the impact of the food and they're easily overlooked." Laidler adds: "A key step Pepsi took to reduce the emissions of its Quaker Porridge Oats was to cook them more in the factory, so it was then cooked less at home."

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In short, reducing the carbon footprint of your grocery shopping raises complicated questions, and the answers may not be to your taste. Bird notes that the most energy-efficient way to drink coffee is instant, because of the scale with which it's made. Small roasters and home grinding normally uses more energy, even if it does taste better and support local businesses. However, other factors have more of an impact: most emissions from coffee are in the milk, if used, followed by the energy to boil the water, rather than growing, roasting or transporting beans.

And that's the core issue at the heart of plastic-free stores: there are bigger changes we could make more easily. That doesn't negate the positive impact of zero-waste shops, notes Bird, as they act as gateways to encouraging people to think when they shop — and they help shame larger supermarkets into action.

Supermarkets are starting to clean up their act, albeit slowly. Waitrose is trialling refill stations, Tesco is trialling alternative packaging materials, and Morrisons is offering wrap-free fruit and vegetables, while ALDI has pledged to cut plastic packaging to zero by 2025. Rather than a small number of thoughtful people shopping at a small number of admirable zero-waste stores, it's better for everyone if the supermarkets themselves also change their practices, so the least amount of single-use plastic is used even for those who aren't within striking distance of progressive shops in Dalston or Cornwall. "Ultimately we need to see the supermarkets embracing reuse culture," Bird says.

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