Customers Bring Their Own Containers to This Package-Free Market in England

There are many ways to reduce your environmental impact while grocery shopping, from bringing your own reusable bags to limiting your list to items you know you’ll actually eat. At Earth.Food.Love in Devon, England, eco-friendliness is part of the store design. As Business Insider reports, every product sold in the building requires customers to provide their own packaging.

Richard Eckersley opened the market with his wife Nicola after making a name for himself in a very different line of work. Eckersley is best known from his days as a professional soccer player for Manchester United, but he was recently inspired to shift his career focus toward helping the planet. “Every time you make a purchase, you cast a vote for the kind of world you wish to live in,” Richard and Nicola write on the business's website. “We want that world to be sustainable, clean, and thriving for our future generations to enjoy.”

Earth.Food.Love was conceived with those future generations in mind—including Richard and Nicola’s 15-month-old daughter Willow. The shop’s all-organic inventory is divided into bins and jars that customers can access by lifting lids or turning spigots. In the dried goods section they’ll find nuts, cereals, beans, spices, chocolates, and baking ingredients. The store even sells liquids by the milliliter, like vinegars and syrups. To take some home, shoppers can bring their own containers or purchase one of the pots sold on-site. After stocking up on groceries they can move on to the toiletry selections, which include package-free toothbrushes and toothpaste.

The Eckersley family based their business on a similar supermarket they visited in Berlin, Germany, but packaging-free grocery stores can be found around the world. To find one near you, you can search for your location in the online zero-waste index Bepakt.