Don’t Waste Durham is focused on reuse as the core of its waste reduction mission. Recycling and composting suffer from limitations, inconsistencies, and unfulfilled promises, and they will not suffice to unbury us from the mountains of trash piling up. The next, critical step forward in waste reduction is reuse.
Reducing waste is only part of reuse’s power. What also makes reuse so compelling is its potential to build local, sustainable, and energized economies.
The centerpiece of Don’t Waste Durham’s reuse mission is its washing/sanitizing operation. Two local businesses with core sustainability missions are leveraging that capability to grow their impact. Part & Parcel, which recently relocated to Durham’s Lakewood neighborhood, offers bulk groceries, home-cleaning products, personal-care products, and other goods with an innovative, reuse-based packaging solution. Fillaree, whose storefront is on Guess Road, provides kitchen and personal-care cleaning products that are refillable by mail or at refill stations located at other Durham businesses.
A Dream Takes Flight
At Fillaree, owner and founder Alyssa Cherry is realizing a dream that she had nurtured for many years. Like many of us, she had become a skeptic of recycling and its limitations. This set her on a reuse journey, with refillable drink containers and other options. She frequently wondered why the reuse/refill concept couldn’t be extended to cleaning products but did little to move that curiosity forward until her family took a vacation to California in 2012. There, she encountered a company that was actually doing it–selling soap in refillable containers.
“I said, gosh, this is actually happening,” Alyssa recalls. “I’d been talking about it for years.”
Fillaree soap products, refillable by mail or at refill stations in Durham.
The wheels started turning from there. Alyssa began teaching herself to make soap–“harder than I thought it was going to be”–and then applied to sell her product at a local farmers market. The establishment of Fillaree followed in 2014, and “we’ve been growing slowly, organically, and steadily for almost 10 years since.” Along the way, the company developed the bag approach–selling the soap in sturdy plastic, refillable bags, having customers return the bags by mail, and washing and refilling the bags for new orders.
A Problem—and a Solution
Fillaree makes its soaps and refills the bags at its storefront, and those operations have presented challenges–which is where Don’t Waste Durham’s washing and sanitizing capability comes in. At the storefront, there was limited space to do the washing required for a growing operation. The labor issues were even more challenging; Fillaree could hire someone to do part-time washing, or it could buy a machine that could efficiently do the job, but the right price points were difficult to pin down.
Alyssa had met Crystal Dreisbach, Don’t Waste Durham’s founder and CEO, around the time she established her business, at gatherings of people with common interests in reducing waste and protecting the environment. There was no immediate “aha” moment when the two realized what their respective organizations could do for one another. At some point, however, she “reached out to Crystal and said, ‘We have these bags; would you take a look and see if you could wash them for us?’ I was already paying someone to wash; I thought, why can’t I pay for an outside service to make things easier? It made sense at that point.”
Crystal jumped at the suggestion. The two began discussions of how the relationship could work and, over the subsequent years, their partnership evolved. A formal wash contract was established in February 2021, under which Don’t Waste Durham is, as of July 2023, washing typically up to 50 Fillaree bags per week and occasionally more than 400 bags per month.
Fillaree bags drying at Don’t Waste Durham’s wash facility.
For the Fillaree team, the relationship with Don’t Waste Durham has been liberating. Alyssa and her employees can focus on making and selling soaps and growing the company–today, more than 100 stores nationwide distribute Fillaree products–while Don’t Waste Durham performs a time-consuming and essential function.
“It solved a big problem,” Alyssa says of the arrangement. “Anybody who wants to make reuse a part of their life or part of their business is going to need someone to wash those dishes, or wash those containers. It’s so necessary. And cleaning and washing dishes is work that is so under-valued.”
Alyssa is looking forward to a continued relationship with Don’t Waste Durham. “We’ll always have more bags to fill.” Looking at her mission from a higher perspective, she notes that “in order to make any circular economy really successful, you have to make it convenient. You have to make it easy for the customer, and you have to make it convenient for the business as well. Having someone come and pick up the bags, wash them, and bring them back is super-convenient for me.”
A Double Mission
For Part & Parcel founder T Land, the establishment of the storefront combines two passions–providing affordable groceries in an eco-friendly manner, and employing Neurodivergent and Disabled individuals. T has worked with the disabled community since 1997 and, in 2010, they founded the Autism Support and Advocacy Center (ASAC), which runs Part & Parcel.
T Land getting jars ready for customers at Part & Parcel.
The store sells a variety of goods in reusable containers, primarily glass jars, that are returnable and washed by–you guessed it–Don’t Waste Durham. The formal, contractual relationship between the two organizations is a couple of years old, but its beginnings go back much further.
Back in the mid-2010s, T had been running the Earth Day farmers market at the Duke School and had invited Don’t Waste Durham to participate. One day, ”I pulled Crystal aside and asked her, ‘Will you come talk to me? I have this idea. I want to start up a package-free, eco-conscious grocery store that would employ folks in the Autistic community and serve as a model for inclusive employment and eco-conscious living and practices. What do you think?’” Crystal loved the idea.
After some trial and error, they found packaging in jars to be the centerpiece of the solution. Crystal focused on logistics and T connected with the Department of Agriculture, which approved the process. “We both were able to come back to each other and say, ‘We’ve got the green light–let’s do it.’”
Will It Fly?
Still, T wondered, if we build it, will they come? Would customers balk at using their old pasta jars to hold name-brand products? “We found out very quickly that people did not care,” T recalls. “They trusted that we had washed and sanitized the jars.” Don’t Waste Durham’s consistently excellent ratings from the Durham County Department of Health certainly haven’t hurt.
Getting ready to wash Part & Parcel jars at Don’t Waste Durham’s wash facility.
Don’t Waste Durham is now washing Part & Parcel’s jars at a rate of 13,000 per year, with seven to eight racks going through the cycle twice a week. “Sometimes the jar intake is a little more than what is being used,” says T, “but for the most part, the flow has been perfect.”
Right now, Part & Parcel is not focused on business growth, per se. “We get asked these questions a lot: Will we franchise? Will we pop one up in Cary? Will we have multiple stores?” Demand growth may prompt such moves, but for now, T claims, the focus is on ensuring that Part & Parcel serves as a model both for eco-conscious grocery shopping and inclusive employment.
Either way, the relationship with Don’t Waste Durham is vital and “will definitely continue,” T says. They add that building on this relationship will be critical to making “living in reuse more ubiquitous.”
“By being able to provide jars that have been washed and sanitized, we’re now providing a financially accessible option for those who want to shop low-waste. You don’t have to bring your own containers, and you don’t have that up-front cost of packaging. And it’s available to all.”
These are two excellent examples of how a washing/sanitizing operation like Don’t Waste Durham’s can anchor a local reuse economy with sustainability as its heart and soul. While Don’t Waste Durham focuses on an essential function, the businesses can focus on what they do best–expand the product line and reach out to the customer.
We at Don’t Waste Durham encourage Durham citizens to support these businesses and others like them. And, as always, we welcome anyone who would like to support Don’t Waste Durham in any way.