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For Alyssa McKeon and husband Luke Simon, green and sustainable stores are one small way they can contribute to the fight against climate change.
Witching Hour Provisions in Hopkinton opened its doors to the community in December 2021. This store is a refilling station and coffee roaster. Customers can bring in their own containers to refill dish soap, hand soap, laundry detergent, and personal care products that generate single-use plastics.
The couple didn’t consider themselves environmentally conscious until they moved to Hopkinton from Salem, Massachusetts, in 2018. In small towns like Hopkinton, residents are responsible for transporting waste to landfills.
Each month they drove to the transfer station in a car full of garbage. Gradually I realized the amount of waste they were creating. McKeon learned how much plastic shampoo, conditioner and detergent containers are accumulating in landfills.
They decided to switch to sustainable alternatives and started restocking supplies at Concord refill stores instead of supermarkets. It is difficult to So they decided to open their own restocking station in Hopkinton.
“Our belief is that every community should have a refill station, just like every community should have a coffee shop,” says McKeon.
Bags of home-roasted coffee are lined up on the wall at the back of the store, and few customers leave without purchasing. Their coffee is packed in compostable bags that decompose in six months with household compost.
Like the coffee bags, each product in the store has been carefully selected to reduce our carbon footprint and is an extension of the tagline “Reuse, Refill, Rethink” painted on the store’s front window.
McKeon and Simon ensure that items in their stores meet at least one of the following criteria:
A curated product line allows Hopkinton residents like Victoria Blum to get most of their cleaning supplies from the store and easily switch to sustainable alternatives. She said the store made product selection easy and straightforward, and she was confident that the items they carried were made from clean and safe materials.
Nearly all of the store shelves are upcycled, recyclable or reusable. We also sell personalized gifts. But dryer balls, toilet cleaning tubs and dishwashing pods are the most popular items.
When it comes to switching to sustainable products, many are put off by the cost. McKeon said the prices he may not be comparable to Walmart or Target, but he only has products that are affordable and not exorbitant.
“I think there’s an assumption that going green is very expensive,” says McKeon.
Blum refills his maple syrup jug with lavender-scented laundry detergent and likes that he can buy the amount he needs, rather than the standard amount supermarket brands force him to buy.
A laundry detergent option available in stores is bar soap that can be cut into pieces and melted to fill many large containers. Bars may look expensive, but that’s not because of the amount of product you can make from them.
“It’s more like a front-loaded cost rather than a cost over time,” says Bram. “You seem to be using the lower concentrations more often.”
McKeon plans to expand its product line to include specialty items such as floor cleaners and room sprays. The couple are also working with businesses to develop a closed-loop program where materials can be brought into the store and they will return them to the manufacturer for composting.
The country has a company that makes plant-based packaging from bagasse, beeswax, seashells and coconut shells, and the couple has made people aware that this is a profitable business model that benefits the planet as well. I would like you to
Since McKeon started using eco-friendly products, he’s made fewer trips to landfills. She doesn’t drive a car full of garbage anymore.
She believes that ‘sustainable is local and local is sustainable’ and encourages people to buy sustainable products from small businesses to make a difference in large manufacturers. I am urging you to
“I think it’s not one person that changes society,” McKeon said. “But we believe we can vote with our dollars.”
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