Another trip to the Refill Room (Zero Waste shop)

I mentioned visiting The Refill Room, a Zero-waste shop in a seaside town not too drastically far away from us.

On Saturday (actually now 2 weeks ago! Forgot to publish this!)  when the sun was out, we decided to pay a visit to that Seaside town so I made sure to bring some containers and bags in order to take advantage of being there and being able to get to the Refill Room.  Because just going there to visit the shop would not be very eco-friendly!

So....what did I buy?

1.  Well, at the back, we have a big brown paper bag.  That is a bag of Branflakes.  The dried goods all come in big pick-n-mix style containers. I filled a brown paper bag with bran flakes! They are all Organic so worked out more expensive than my buying my usual Own Brand Lidl ones but I was happy with the price.  I think they cost me about £2.30 for 500g.

2.  In front of those, you can see a Killner bottle. I filled this up with Organic Gluten free Tamari sauce (this is Soy Sauce basically).  I bought this Killner bottle to fill up as I use quite a lot of this.  This was a lot more expensive than I would have liked. Although buying Top Quality Organic Soy sauce would cost this much, I usually use Lidl or Aldi's own so paying around £5.80 for this (around 300ml)  was quite a hard but it was already dispensed!  Still, I am glad not to be making any waste from this.

3.  To the right, we have a White Shampoo bottle.  In this, I have purchased the Organic Sea Buckthorn  shampoo which cost me around £2.30 for around 300ml which seemed a good price as I like to use Natural Products anyway which are more expensive.

4.  In my blue Tupperware box, I purchased a large quantity of Butterbeans £1.57 for around 580g which is cheaper than buying tins of these already cooked.

These were all my purchases from the Refill Room but I also bought some vegetables (without packaging) in the Greengrocers nearby which were all cheaper than supermarkets.

Last Saturday, because of Engineering works, CBC and his Mum drove me to this town so I could catch the alternative train line to London so I took advantage of being in the town.

I took along 2 empty shower gel bottles as I thought we were out of Shower gel (it turned out I found 2 more bottles under my chest of drawers later).  Because of traffic, I ended up not having time to actually go to the store myself so I left the bottles with CBC who promised to fill them up.

As it happened CBC couldn't find a parking space so he sent his Mum in.  Who misunderstood the 'weighing your own bottles' concept and ended up paying for the bottle weight also so I can't comment on that!!!

He also went and filled up my Ecover Fabric softener bottles from Greens, the health food store round the corner.

Here are some pics from a precious visit where I bought various herbs (much cheaper) , red lentils and Jasmine rice!

Next time, I'd like to fill up on Olive Oil and plan to use an old Lemonade glass bottle.  I have to say, I have a lovely warm feeling that comes from knowing I have used an old container rather than generating new plastic or other waste.  Though some things are a little more expensive, others balance them out so I am pleased to continue with this endeavour!  As Jesus said, "Many drops make an ocean!"  My little corner of the waste may not do lots, but it is SOMETHING!

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