Manchester set to get first zero-waste supermarket
Flourish Foods would be the first of its kind to open in Greater Manchester
The fight to stamp out single-use plastics in Greater Manchester has stepped up, as Key 103 can reveal the city will soon have its very first zero-waste supermarket.
Flourish Foods is set to open this summer, stocked with 'pantry store' basics, including fruit, nuts, spices and pasta, as well as cleaning products and some environmentally friendly hygiene products.
The scheme is the brainchild of local librarian Nikki, who said:
"Having lived in the US for a while, where you can take your own jars to the supermarket, you can use your own packaging and use recyclable packaging, I thought that I would be able shop like that when I came home, especially in the city but I just couldn't. It's completely impossible and it really upset me. I think we need to think about how we recycle and our approach to it.
"Where a glass bottle can be a glass bottle again, a plastic bottle can never be the same again. So even though we can recycle plastic bottles, we can never make them into the same thing again. They downgrade each time and eventually end up in landfill. So while we can recycle, it's better to refuse and so refusing single use plastics is the key and that's what we're going to try and offer.
"We're all quite familiar with reduce, reuse, recycle as a phrase but I think we need to get better at refusing, reusing, recycling.
"We'll sell pantry store basics, cleaning products and hygiene products. We're going to be really open about where we get our food from and if any of it does come in plastics.
"You can get nuts, fruits, pasta, rice, spices, herbs, all of those kinds of things you can find normally in plastic wrap in a supermarket.
"It is a new way to shop, it's about changing our ideas. But a lot of that ground work is happening and it's just another step in that evolution. I think that's something that we can definitely run here.
"We'll be inviting people to bring in their own containers to the store, load them up and then come back again, and again and again and just think a bit more about what they're doing when they're shopping."