Worcester refillery offers a sustainable way to stock up
WORCESTER — Barbara Alteri and Kim Mowers are the owners of a unique shop off of Burncoat Street at the Burncoat Center for Arts and Wellness, with a focus on sustainability. The shop sells handmade, environmentally-friendly art, essential oils, and is Worcester's first and only refillery.
A refillery is a store where customers bring their own containers or are able to purchase environmentally-friendly reusable containers and fill them with personal and home essential goods like shampoo, lotion and deodorant. The refillery at the Burncoat Center for Arts and Wellness currently offers more than 70 home, laundry and bath and body products for refill.
"It's a labor of love," Alteri said. "We started off just with all our art classes. Everything used was from salvaged materials so we were like, let's see if a refillery would take off. We knew it was an important thing the community needed."
The shop opened in 2020 and the two women added a refillery in 2022.
All the products are natural. Most are sourced locally from around New England. Closer to the cash register in the shop is a sandwich board displaying the number of single-use plastic bottles saved from landfills. Last year, they sold 26,396 ounces of bulk products and saved 2,199 single-use plastic bottles. Alteri said they expect to double, if not triple, that number for 2024.
"That's kind of why we have let the [sustainable] aspect of the whole business spill into everything else," Mowers said.
This is the only refillery in Worcester.
Alteri said they have a steady stream of customers that come in with their empty containers every week.
Along with their shop, Mowers and Alteri host craft-making sessions at the store's location, 78 Burncoat St., and recently hosted a make-your-own face wash session for teenagers at the Worcester Public Library. While bringing awareness to the issue of singleuse plastics, Alteri said another goal of the shop is to bring the community together.
"A lot of times, let's say someone donates like 500 quarks or something. And then we'll create a class based on using for that class," Alteri said. "So we don't always come up with a class and then try to source the stuff sometimes we made the class based on what's been donated."
Mowers and Alteri said they do not live a completely sustainable lifestyle at home but have cut back on single-use plastics and containers a lot.
"Once it becomes something that's really important to you, it's not that hard," Mowers said. "If you do a little bit at a time, it's not an overwhelming change in lifestyle."
If you are interested in starting your zero-waste journey, you can start by calculating the amount of greenhouse gas emissions you are producing and disposing of at home. The EPA has a domestic carbon footprint calculator on its website.