In London you have to be Unpackaged

by Annalisa Audino

There are only five rules to have an eco-friendly shopping in London: remember to bring your containers from home, go on foot to Unpackaged and say “hello”, choose the product and amount you want, take your goods home in your own containers (if you forget, we have reusable bags) and, when you’ve run out, come back for a refill.We’re not mad! This is a very interesting English proposal to do shopping respecting nature. Unpackaged, this is the name, was set up with the support of organisations as Global Tolerance, Monkeehouse, Multistorey, Portobello Businnes Centre, etc and it was founded in 2006 in Amweel Street in London by Catherine Conway. She was persuaded that there was a better and more ecological way to go shopping. And it works!

You can choose products in a suggestive environment and in a big variety of local goods: loose Organic Wholefoods (as arborio risotto rice, brown soft Sugar, plain Wholemeal Flour, Forest Mushroom Mix, etc), loose Organic Tea & Coffee, loose Organic Superfoods, Cakes, Biscuits and Sweets and fresh products. Now owners are trying to develop an extensive sustainability policy based on their triple bottom line which will be transparent, measurable and cover every aspect of the business. The policy will cover, in depth, elements of the business as suppliers, use of any packaging, waste, energy consumption, transport and community involvement.
The starting point, and also the original point, is the fact that quite all products are unpackaged.

«Unnecessary packaging increases the price of the goods you buy – tells Catherine Conway - It means you are charged twice; first when you buy over packaged goods and then through your council tax to dispose of your rubbish. Then unnecessary packaging is a waste of resources at every level: to produce, store and transport, remove and to dispose of. The two main methods of disposing of this packaging – landfill and incineration – are major pollutants for humans and the environment and release greenhouse gases. And what about recycling? While some packaging is recycled, most ends up in landfill sites and some packaging is just difficult and often impossible to recycle. According to government figures, landfill sites for London’s non-hazardous rubbish are likely to be full by the end of next year and other landfill sites in the South East will run out of capacity by early 2013”.
So, recycling is a solution. But not the only one. It’s necessary to limit the waste production. How? Buying only useful things and using our containers and recycling them». It’s simple!

We could start also in Italy: in some supermarkets there are dispensers of milk, drinks and detergents.
But eco-friendly shops are very difficult to introduce: in Milan there was a shop of ecological dress (The Dodo and the Dinosaur), made with biological cotton and recycled materials, but they had to close because of the opposition of big factories. They opened their spaces on Internet: web communication makes easier to reach a lot of people and gives the possibility to inform, with a limited waste amount.

«Web communication – tells Conway - is more environmentally friendly than printing materials. Our business has always changed a lot so it means we can update information quickly, easily and cheaply. We have hundreds of followers on Twitter and FB as well as subscribers to our monthly email newsletter so I guess people like it!».
Unpackaged has been featured on BBC Breakfast, BBC London News, Channel 5 News, Capital Radio, BBC Radio London, Radio 4’s PM programme, Radio Romania, CBS Weekend News, The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph Magazine, Time Out, The Daily Express, Design Week, Wallpaper.com, thelondonpaper, Which Magazine and lots of green blogs.

If you want to have a look you can visit http://beunpackaged.com: there are wonderful photos!