‘We’re not hippies! We’re just normal people’

AS recently as 2018, you couldn’t get rice in this county without it coming wrapped in throw-away, single-use plastic.
That all changed when Mayo News columnist McKinley Neal opened Mayo’s first ever refill shop at the end of a narrow lane in the heart of Westport.
The concept is very simple. You go in, you fill your containers with coffee, pasta, washing up liquid, or whatever else, you pay for it, you go home. And then you do it all over again next time you’re in – with the exact same containers.
Two of her former customers have since opened their own refill shops, thus tripling the number in the county in six years – fair going, when you consider many counties don’t have any yet.
Far from competing with McKinley, Rosie Joyce of The Habit Store in Castlebar and Fiona Lewon of The Wild Rocket in Ballina have joined her on a mission to make shopping in Mayo more sustainable.
They have built up a loyal customer base and a good passing trade, with tourists and other eco-conscious punters travelling distances to shop with them.

Challenging times
The shops’ success has not come without its trials though.
When McKinley opened Pax Whole Foods in late 2018, there were only a handful of refill shops in the entire country.
Partly due to increased awareness around climate and sustainability, this mini-industry went through ‘a mini-boom’ that peaked with the bread-baking phenomenon of the first Covid lockdown. But that mini-boom was followed by something of a mini-bust.
“When we started it felt like there was a few refill shops opening every few months. And it feels like now there’s more closing down, and I don’t see any opening,” Rosie Joyce tells The Mayo News over Zoom.
In recent years, the challenges posed by Brexit, Covid and the war in Ukraine has caused many refill shops to close.
One Kildare-based shop owner who didn’t even last a year in business. “She said: ‘If I had known that Russia was going to invade Ukraine, and transport costs and availability of stuff was going to be such an issue, I just wouldn’t have bothered opening’,” McKinley recalls.
Then there’s the continued reliance on the supermarkets, and the perception that they are cheaper.
However, McKinley and Rosie make no bones about the fact that retail is a tough nut to crack, particularly as sole traders.
The work is unrelenting, and occasionally involves unloading 600 kilos of bulk foods by yourself when you’re short of staff, as McKinley had to do recently.
“That’s not for everyone, and that’s not how other retail businesses work,” she says.
“It’s exhausting. You’re constantly talking, you have to show the enthusiasm as if it’s your first day every day,” adds Rosie.

Zero waste
Despite the challenges, the interest in sustainable zero-waste shopping is definitely there.
“We have seen a lot more regular customers be a lot more consistent this summer than years past,” McKinley notes.
For those who aren’t used to it, the zero-waste shopping experience can be a bit unnerving. We have become so used to grabbing plastic and paper-wrapped produce straight off the shelves that pouring it into your own container can feel somewhat alien.
But, as Rosie points out, this is the way people did for years, before the days of supermarkets.
“We have to get people thinking that this is the normal way to shop rather than it being the hippie way. We’re not hippies! We’re just normal people,” she laughs.
And more people are getting into it.
“I had a 15-year-old boy in here during the week teaching his friend how to refill sweets. It was amazing. Versus I had a 90-year-old woman in here yesterday getting her pastille soap for making her own cleaning products. So it is quite varied,” Rosie says.
It doesn’t take long to get used to either, according to Fiona Lewon, who co-owns Wild Rocket on Ballina’s Tone Street with her sister, Nora.
“A lot of people have said to me how much less waste they have in their bins from even just getting some staples like pasta or rice,” Fiona tells The Mayo News.

Starting small
The zero-waste philosophy comes at a time when the messaging around the environment and climate change has never been louder.
But with the increased awareness has come a spike in whataboutism.
“I think there’s just a common kind of a trend, ‘Well it’s somebody else’s problem’ and ‘What’s the point?’,” says Rosie. “There’s so many times I’ve heard, ‘Well what’s the point in me doing this when there’s a private jet going from London up to Edinburgh with Rishi Sunak going to a meeting?’.”
Then add in the fact that much-touted measures like solar panels, electric cars and home retrofitting are ‘not achievable to the everyday person’.
“I don’t want the Government telling me ‘You need to do this and this’ while their government buildings are lit up like a Christmas tree every single day and they are all spinning around in taxis all over Dublin,” adds Rosie.
McKinley, who hails from a ‘consumer driven’ United States, says small steps are the best place to start when trying to help Mother Earth.
“From my perspective, nobody’s doing the hard messaging, which is first you have to reduce. Absolutely, we all have to reduce,” she says.
“I don’t go out and buy new clothes for myself and my family unless they are absolutely necessary. But that’s not a popular opinion. We have to just reduce the things in packaging.”
Rosie’s message?
“I think the importance of shops like ours is just showing people, ‘Yes, we are not going to change the world, but we are not going to get there unless we all start doing something small’.”
There’s a thought.