Shopping in a zero-waste grocery store without plastic bags and food packaging is a dream for many eco-conscious consumers. However, that dream has now become a reality in Berlin.

 According to The Epoch Times, Original Unverpackt (Original Unpackaged) has made this possible.

Thanks to its founders Milena Glimbovski and Sara Wolf the store continues to go from strength to strength in 2017.  They had originally imagined a novel approach to sustainable shopping and that ‘no-waste’ grocery store came into existence to give shoppers a one-of-a-kind, eco-friendly shopping experience.

This Zero-Waste Grocery Store is Fully Stocked!

The shelves at Original Unpackaged are stocked in bulk by using dispensable bins. Almost 350 products are on offer at this store. This includes organic vegetables, dry grains, dried fruits, and pourable liquids that consist of yogurt, milk, and shampoo. Shoppers can either borrow refillable containers from the store or bring their own. They may even put bags crafted out of recycled paper into use and encourage the use of customers’ own containers.

While making payments, consumers are billed based on the weight of the product they have purchased minus their containers’ weight. This kind of shopping is beneficial for the customers as they can buy exactly the amount, they require rather than overspending on food that might end up being wasted or thrown out.

Crowdfunding a Zero-waste store!

For funding their experimental grocery store idea, Glimbovski and Wolf ran a successful crowdfunding campaign for social entrepreneurship. This helped them raise adequate money to realize their store idea. The duo’s mission is to transform the grocery shopping experience and open a supermarket chain across the nation that’s packaging-free.

Glimbovski and Wolf’s crowdfunding blog gives an insight into what made the duo come up and execute this idea of innovative, zero-waste stores. Their blog tells that shoppers often find very colourful items with extremely colourful packaging in the market.  However, what everyone tends to forget is that such packaging is a mere waste at the end of the day. Germany alone generates as much as 16 million tons of packaging waste each year. All these factors encouraged the duo to take up this project to show the food industry that different ways of operating are indeed possible.

What is a Zero Waste Shop – An Overview

These stores help consumers to lead a less wasted life with zero-waste packaging. This is accomplished by placing bulk products in big dispensing containers. You’ll usually be able to see where a zero-waste business is located by the display walls containing glass containers full of food items for dispensing.

Zero waste shops that have plastic-free products, plus plastic-free packaging and encourage customers to have reusable containers to reduce any unnecessary packaging in-store, and that offer all your grocery essentials including fruit and veg, personal hygiene products, and sustainable household cleaning supplies, will help to lower the carbon footprint of each customer and encourage zero waste shopping to a larger audience.

To have a better chance of getting rid of waste, customers are being encouraged to bring their bags and containers.  Processes will differ between stores, but continuity can easily be performed by installing self-weigh systems in shops to encourage customers to bring their disposable packaging (including paper bags) to pack their items in.  This will assist with a huge reduction in the overall amount of single-use plastic usage in the shopping experience and encourage the use of plastic-free alternatives.

Zero Waste Shopping – Conclusion

Zero waste is now becoming the norm across the world. Nevertheless, some countries are more common than others like the Australian and Canadian regions. Now of writing zero waste retailers are very few in Britain.  Unfortunately, this zero-waste shop hasn’t reached everyone yet but maybe sooner or later we will have easy access to packages.  The continued marketing and creation of an eco-friendly shop with sustainable lifestyle products mixed with a zero-plastic shopping experience can become the norm in all societies.  The future will see food waste drop and plastic-free shops emerge in all corners of the world so we can all do our bit to become more eco-friendly in day-to-day life.