It all started with a mouse. Catherine Conway was unpacking all her food from the supermarket into glass jars to prevent it being eaten by a mouse that had taken up residence in her home when she had an idea. “I remember very distinctly, one day, having all this packaging in my hands, thinking: why I can’t I just go to a shop and refill everything in jars?” It was 2005, and Conway, a charity worker, had been learning about the businesses that are set up to create social and environmental good. “I was in my late 20s. I didn’t have kids and I didn’t have a mortgage. And in my professional life, I was looking for something interesting to do.”

She decided to set up a market stall in central London selling unpackaged dry goods – everything from Ecover cleaning products and cereal to nuts, dried fruit and rice – which people could only buy if they brought their own containers. “It was popular with a small amount of people right from the start: early adopters who, like me, wanted a solution. People who knew packaging was a problem, and didn’t want it in their homes.”

Fast forward 14 years and last week Waitrose launched a packaging-free trial, allowing customers at a store in Oxford to purchase a wide range of the goods on sale in their own refillable containers. And it was Conway, 42, to whom Waitrose turned for help with creating the concept for the store and setting up the trial. She now runs a retail consultancy called Unpackaged and initially attracted the attention of Waitrose and other supermarkets after she created a packaging-free space within one branch of the retailer Planet Organic.

“We were trying all these different ways of encouraging people to move over to refillable containers,” she says. Success did not come immediately. For years, she had been told by retail experts that the concept would never work in a supermarket, and there were times, Conway admits, when she thought about giving up. “It was only when public consciousness about the issue changed that people really started switching over.”

That moment came in December 2017, after the now-famous plastic pollution episode of Blue Planet II aired on television. Overnight, Conway found herself riding a huge tidal wave of public antipathy towards plastic packaging. “When Blue Planet came out, it just totally shifted the dial on every aspect of packaging.”

Disturbed by the images they saw of sealife tangled in plastic waste, some viewers realised they needed to change their habits right away, she says. “That programme flipped the light switch. When wonderful Mr Attenborough spoke to people, it didn’t sound like he was preaching. He was just presenting a fact to people: this is a real problem we have to deal with, and there is no other option but to deal with it.”

Campaigner Catherine Conway from Unpackaged. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Suddenly, she says, finding new ways to reduce your plastic packaging waste – from reusable coffee cups to paper straws – became fashionable and cool. People who had previously been too embarrassed to take their containers to Planet Organic started to do so. Within a month purchases of unpackaged goods in the store had increased by 40%. By Easter, Planet Organic had expanded the Unpackaged concept into three more of its shops, and late in the summer Waitrose, too, came on board.

“It was a very open door I was pushing,” she says. “They were ready for it. They were like: morally, we know this is the right thing to do. We just have to build a business case for it.”

The supermarket’s 11-week experiment will not only test the concept of a unpackaged shop floor, but also the popularity of different refillable goods stations. From the moment they step in the door, customers will be flooded with environmental messages encouraging them to reduce their packaging waste and offering 10% discounts to those who bring their own containers to fill.

For Conway, who advised Waitrose on everything from supply chain logistics and customer refill processes to marketing and staff training, the past week has been a dream come true. “The best thing, over the past few days, has been the willingness of people to say it won’t be a problem to bring their containers in, and that they’ve realised we have to do things differently. ”

By contrast, when she first started trying to sell goods via refillable containers, many potential customers would say: what’s the problem with packaging? “Now, there’s a consciousness that wasn’t there before. And people are being very vocal about wanting change.”

Conway is currently in talks with “two or three” other major supermarkets and thinks that in six to 12 months all of them will be running unpackaged trials. There is “massive pressure” on supermarkets to change their approach to packaging right now, she says. “Staff are on the receiving end of a lot of abuse from customers about the frustrations of not being about to shop without plastic.” Campaigning organisations such as Greenpeace are also attempting to hold them to account with league tables ranking the supermarkets’ plastic policies.

Under a new waste strategy unveiled by the government in December 2018 supermarkets and other retailers could be charged penalties for allowing difficult-to-recycle plastic to be bought by their customers, and lower fees for packaging that is easy to reuse or recycle.

“I hope that the work we’re doing at Waitrose will show the other supermarkets that now is the time to be bold,” says Conway. Ultimately, though, she wants to see a systemic change whereby, for example, brands offer their products in reusable containers that customers can return to the system, or supermarkets set up schemes which re-circulate used containers to other customers after a home delivery.

“I think we’ll start to see the introduction of those systems in three to five years,” she says.

For now, though, she is savouring the triumphs of the past week. “The supermarkets are listening to us. I finally feel heard.”

It’s a wrap

Clean up



Swap your soap dispenser and shampoo and conditioner bottles for bars.

Water supply



Carry a refillable water bottle with you. Download the Refill app to find places near your location which will allow you to refill your bottle.

Freeze out the bags



Buy biodegradable clear bags instead of plastic freezer bags.

Cut the clingfilm



Instead of clingfilm, use greaseproof paper or if you need something that will grip to bowls and plates opt for a reusable beeswax wrap.

A lot of bottle



Get your milk delivered in glass bottles which can be returned and reused. Use findmeamilkman.net to find your closest deliverer.