Cambridgeshire environmentalist Martin Cooper on refills

Martin Cooper's refill shop in St Ives. (Image: Martin Cooper)

In June, we celebrated World Refill Day – a date in the calendar organised by charities Refill and City to Sea, to recognise the impact of our single use plastic consumption and highlighting the easy things we can do to reduce this.

Research conducted by the charities showed people really want to reduce single-use packaging, but struggle as supermarkets don’t offer packaging-free and reusable alternatives.

However, a lot of the big brand companies have started to offer ‘refills’ to their products – from hand soap to laundry liquid.

While they offer a refill solution – you can refill your original bottle (or in some cases a special ‘reusable’ bottle they sell you!) with a larger pouch of product, also made of plastic – and the kind that can’t be easily recycled by local councils.

Not only is this greenwashing at its finest, they continue to try and sell us more and more plastic, all of which take the same production resources to make as the original product.

So, is this about doing good for our planet or making people feel better about buying their products?

As highlighted by the charities, we know the overproduction and consumption of single-use plastic is creating a global environmental and humanitarian crisis.

It is not only polluting our planet, and contributing to the climate crisis we are facing, but is also making its way into our bodies through the air we breathe and the food we eat.

Selling people the idea of being more environmentally responsible by buying a 'refill' product in more plastic is morally wrong and is doing nothing to create a sustainable planet.

We desperately need to move from the disposable, single-use culture we are used to, to a more sustainable future with reusing and refilling at the heart of that change.

As the team behind World Refill Day point out, we already have the tools we need to change the world, with a reusable future more than achievable.

But, as ever, it’s not always an easy process, and it requires governments across the world to come together and make this happen.

In the meantime, while we don’t have control over the moral decisions companies take when trying to sell us products in plastic, we do have control over whether we buy them.