Add “Refill” to your Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra!

Today’s blog comes from our friends at Blue Dot Refill, Deidre and Beth! Blue Dot Refill is a local, environmentally-conscious refill business that strives to prevent plastic pollution – certainly a mission we can’t help but support! Read on to learn more about the impacts of plastic and how this “refillutionary” idea came to be. 

“Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”…we hear and see it repeatedly.  We all know about, and are presumably committed to, recycling.  You just put it in a recycle bin and it goes away, right? Sounds pretty simple, but actually it’s more complicated that just tossing it the blue bin and walking away.

According to the EPA, plastics make up more than 12 percent of all municipal solid waste streams.  And even though much of it’s being put in a recycling bin, only about 8 percent of it actually gets recycled. Why only 8 percent? Unlike the glass and metal industries which can keep recycling glass and metals numerous times, plastics are typically only recycled once, turned into only one other product which generally can not be recycled again and must then be landfilled at the end of its life.  That’s the reason recycling plastic is no longer enough if we want to clean up our planet, its rivers, its oceans. There simply is no “away” with plastic, even after it get recycled that one time, it then exists somewhere out there for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years polluting our ecosystem as it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces.

So now it makes sense to add “Refill” to the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle creed.  Many of us have gotten into the habit of (or trying to be better at!) bringing our own reusable bags to the store when we shop.  How cool would it be if we could also bring out own bottles and reuse them, too?  Lots of us already have a bathroom hand soap pump that we refill, but what if you could refill your shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, body wash & lotion containers as well?  And that’s just the plastic bottles in your bathroom.  If you could refill all the plastic bottles in use in your laundry room, kitchen, and cleaning closet (laundry detergent, dish soap, various household cleaning products)…that’d be a lot of plastic bottles you could save from the waste stream!  If you haven’t heard, San Diego has it’s own Eco-Soap refill shop where you can refill all these items and more:  Blue Dot Refill in Ocean Beach.

If saving the plastic from polluting the Planet isn’t incentive enough, how about saving a little money?  Every time you buy a product packaged in plastic, you’re also paying for the bottle. You save money by refilling your own container. How much depends on the specific product, but it is generally from 10-40% over retail.

Blue Dot Refill may be San Diego’s first refill store, but it’s not the first of its kind. Refill stores have been popping up in Oregon, the Bay Area and Northern California since 2009. Blue Dot Refill’s founder, Deidre Prozinski, had an “Eureka” moment when she accidentally ran into such a store called S.O.A.P. in Placerville, CA.  S.O.A.P. stands for Save Our Ailing Planet. Inspired by the idea that if a small town in the Sierras could support a refill concept store, that San Diegans surely could, Deidre, embarked on the journey to establish Blue Dot Refill as Southern California’s first soap refill store.   The “Blue Dot” in Blue Dot Refill was further inspired by a NASA photo taken of the Earth by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990.   A few years later astronomer Carl Sagan shares his interpretation of the meaning of the photograph in his book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space:

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

And that’s Blue Dot Refill. Like any small business, it’s a lot of work but also a labor of love.  We’ve received a lot of community support and even a couple of awards!  San Diego Magazine honored us with a 2014 “Best Of” Award in the Shopping category as “Best Planet-Friendly Outpost.”  Blue Dot Refill was one of only thirteen shops selected.   We were also honored with a “Customer Service Business of the Year Award” from the Ocean Beach Mainstreet Association.  And we’re just getting started, with over 4,206 bottles saved and counting!

Blue Dot Refill carries a variety of products including laundry detergent, household cleaners, shampoo, face wash – you name it! Check out their extensive list of products and start refilling today!