When you’re shopping, how much thought do you give to not only the products you buy, but also the packaging they come in and the waste they create, or to the overall environmental footprint of your consumption? Have you ever considered changing your habits but found the prospect daunting? Laura Porter and Emily Ting have thought about it a lot, and their Peninsula establishments are here to help, offering local customers the opportunity to make shopping for everyday essentials (and goodies) more sustainable in an accessible way.

Byrd’s Filling Station in San Mateo and Right On! Refillery in Los Altos are both examples of “refilleries“ – retailers that aim to reduce reliance on single-use plastic by offering items in bulk so customers can refill their containers and use them again and again. Sound simple? That’s the idea. The shops have customers’ convenience at the forefront, designed to make the process easy (in addition to bulk refills, they also sell some items in eco-friendlier materials, such as glass, metal, cloth and paper, among other product options.)

Byrd’s Filling Station

Byrd’s Filling Station founder Porter’s journey away from waste began about five years ago, when she was horrified by a San Francisco Chronicle article she read about plastic pollution.

“I left that article sitting on the countertop and I kept walking by it and thinking, ‘Something’s gotta give,’” she recalled. “Our whole world is packed in plastic and that's what's causing this problem.” As she learned more, she became concerned not only about the harmful effects of plastic waste in the environment, but also the pollution involved in manufacturing it. At the same time, the busy mom was learning about and inspired by the Plastic Free July movement and decided to change her family’s consumption habits. It was trickier than she expected.

Over the next year, she set goals to avoid plastic at the grocery store, then worked on finding plastic-free sources of staples like shampoo and deodorant. She found what she was looking for online, but feared the packing and shipping process ran contrary to her sustainability goals. Plus, ordering from so many different vendors was time-consuming and tedious. She began stocking up on deliveries from a shop in the East Bay and found other locals were interested in getting the goods as well.

“There needs to be a place to go to make it convenient,” she remembers thinking, desiring a central spot in her own neck of the woods. In May 2022 she officially opened Byrd’s Filling Station with the goal of providing a one-stop shop in San Mateo to meet basic grocery and household needs, including all sorts of food (both bulk and packaged), cleaning products, makeup and much more.

The community’s response to the shop has been “very positive,” she said. “From there, it is a change of habits (remembering to take bags or jars along to refill). It’s thinking a little differently. It’s doing a lot of education that I think most grocery stores don’t have to do.”

Top sellers include “a surprising amount” of fresh-ground peanut butter, made in-house, and whole-bean coffee, roasted in San Francisco. One of Porter’s personal favorite items are the charming bar soaps crafted by a maker in Oakland.

“She approaches it from a zero-waste standpoint,” she said. “She’ll take the little leftover pieces and build them into confetti soaps so all the pieces get used.”

She’s also proud to stock plastic-free cosmetics.

“I was really excited to bring these in,” she said. “It’s hard to buy makeup online. You don't know if your monitor is giving you the right shade.”

Locals know that boba drinks are wildly popular. However, the disposable plastic cups, wrappers, and straws that often come with them are the opposite of eco-friendly. At Byrd’s Filling Station, reusable glass boba tumblers and straws (with lid, silicon plug and cleaning brush) are available, so boba fans can get their treats without the guilt. After all, bringing one’s own reusable cups to coffee shops has become a fairly common sight, so why not boba?

“People do hesitate because of the willingness of some stores to accept them,” she said. “What we have found is that many will if you just ask,” including downtown San Mateo’s Sweet Moment, Heere Tea and Urban Ritual. As long as the tumblers are clean, there’s no hygienic reason for an establishment to refuse, she said.

While the goal was originally zero plastic waste, Porter noted Byrd’s does now stock just a few items packaged with a small amount of plastic – some cheeses, plus some vegan meat alternatives. The decision was not made lightly, but ultimately the tradeoff was deemed worth it so customers could get more of their grocery shopping done in one place.

Plus, “when we look at the total carbon emissions of our diet, these plant-based options are more sustainable than choosing meat,” she said.

Right On! Refillery

Green habits have long been a part of life for Right On! Refillery’s Ting.

“I kind of grew up this way,” she said. “My mother was like the original hippie.” Eating local, organic food, belonging to a co-op and composting in their huge garden were the norms for her Massachusetts family. Ting always aimed for sustainability in adulthood, but as a parent of three young children living in Silicon Valley during the age of COVID, she found it had become increasingly difficult. As the family grew, the household was going through things like sunscreen and shampoo at accelerating rates, and during the heart of the pandemic, deliveries, complete with extraneous packaging, began to pile up. Ting recalled looking around her home and seeing how full her trash and recycling bins were getting.

“I just started getting kind of disgusted with all of it,” she said. Like Porter, she did research and was dismayed to learn that just a tiny percentage of what gets put into household recycling bins actually ends up being recycled.

“It’s kind of a weird myth,” she said. “People will ask, ‘This is recyclable?' Well, yes, you can put it in your bin but what happens to it from there is a big question mark. Most of that waste is going to the landfills.”

She took a trip to Ethos, a low-waste shop in Capitola (the owner has since opened a second branch in Los Gatos), and came away inspired to bring something similar closer to home. Right On! Refillery began as a pop-up on First Street in downtown Los Altos in April, then opened in its current location in June.

“So far it’s been great,” she said, calling Los Altos very small business-friendly and lauding the efforts of GreenTown Los Altos, an active environmental group for Los Altos and Los Altos Hills.

“Buying local is a huge part of the sustainability movement. We had a lot of interested people right away,” she said.

Right On! specializes in mostly locally made goods, with bestsellers including refills of laundry and dish soaps, lotions and hair care products. And while she sells reusable receptacles, “steadily, more people are bringing in their own containers, which is the point, the ideal,” Ting said. “People are getting the hang of that. We try to talk people through that not only are they saving the plastic container, but they’re also purchasing a product that in most cases was made locally, that’s had the supply chain checked, the labor practices checked.”

For customers new to the low-waste lifestyle, Ting often recommends Not Paper Towels – a line of reusable, machine-washable cotton cleaning cloths, made in Santa Rosa and available in cute patterns – as a first step.

“It’s nice to have good entry points for people who are interested in the concept but don't know where to start,” she said. “It's easy for people to understand what to do with it, and see, ‘Oh, look I’m cutting down on all the paper towels I’m buying.’”

Ting herself is an enthusiast of all cleaners in bar form, which cuts out the need for containers entirely.

“Pretty much all liquids have an alternative that's a bar. You can replace dish soap with a dish block, lotion with lotion bars, deodorant, shampoo and conditioner…to me it's really a no-brainer,” she said. “It’s more concentrated; it works just as well, it washes your dishes great. My house feels good. You look around and you don't see a lot of plastic.”

Right On! also offers customers a place to bring in waste that isn’t accepted in their household bins, with boxes for hard-to-recycle items such as toothpaste tubes, kids’ squeezy snack pouches, razors and lithium batteries.

Now equipped with a trailer, Ting hopes to “bring the refill concept mobile” and is considering doing Right On! pop-ups in nearby cities. She also plans to reach out to local corporations in the hopes of partnering with them so that employees can bring their containers and refill their supplies right from their offices.

Think globally, shop locally

Porter and Ting said they and other Bay Area low-waste merchants often work together to maximize efficiency, as many vendors have ordering minimums, and to cut down on deliveries. They see their stores as part of a bigger movement, with the goal to bring low-waste shopping to the mainstream. As they noted, to really change consumer habits involves infrastructure and a wider reach so that shoppers can access these goods and services wherever they’re based. They are also hopeful people can make a basic mindshift.

“I think what would make the biggest difference is, we’re not in the habit of just looking at something at home and saying, ‘I can refill this,’” Porter said. For generations, consumers have been conditioned to ignore packaging, thinking of things as disposable. “If we can change that mindset to, ‘I need to go refill the dish soap’ instead of, ‘I need a new dish soap,’ that's a powerful change of words and change of thought.”

Ting acknowledged that “taking that first step is a little bit of a challenge mentally, but once they start, people tend to realize it's not so hard.”

Byrd’s Filling Station, 219 S. San Mateo Drive, San Mateo; 650-242-1976, Instagram: @byrdsfillingstation. byrdsfillingstation.com.

Right On! Refillery, 300 State St., Los Altos; 408-458-5381, Instagram: @rightonrefillery. rightonrefillery.com.