Written by Hannah Westwood
NADA is a zero waste shop in Leicester’s city centre, located in St. Martin’s Square. It’s the perfect place for stocking up on essentials and trying out new zero waste products! In this blog post, we want to share some information about the shop and encourage you to pay it a visit next time you are in town. Finding a new zero or low-waste swap has never been easier as you can browse products in-store.
One of NADA’s main aims is to encourage customers to buy food without packaging. A large amount of the store is dedicated to foods that you can buy by weight, and take home in your own jars or containers. If you don’t have any containers at home, there is a small selection of jars by the door that you can use to help you get started!
The foods that are stocked range from pastas and rices to seeds, nuts and cereals. You can even buy oil and loose leaf tea! In addition to offering these items without packaging, NADA makes every effort to source these products locally. This reduces the carbon footprint and emissions of these products, as well as eliminating the packaging.
In addition to food items, NADA also has a range of cleaning products that you can fill up old spray bottles with to save you buying new ones in packaging.
There are also other types of products stocked in the store, from water bottles to produce bags to beeswax wraps. These items can help you to transition to a more sustainable kitchen. Beeswax wraps can replace cling film, wooden handled washing-up brushes replace plastic ones and long-lasting compostable sponges replace the standard supermarket alternatives that need throwing away often.
There are range of hygiene and bathroom products to choose from in store. You can find wooden-handled toothbrushes, natural and refillable deodorant and low waste cosmetics. The range in store will help you find a zero or low waste swap for many items that you use regularly but are disposable and often use plastic packaging. NADA aims to remove the barriers that are in place for people to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle, and by visiting the store you can find sustainable alternatives that you didn’t even know existed!
It is important to note that you do not need to immediately go and swap out every product you can for a more sustainable alternative. Not only will this hurt your bank balance but it is not the most sustainable thing to do! The best thing you can do is use up the products you have until you can’t any more, because they need throwing away. Once you have done this, you can make the switch to a more sustainable alternative. So, if you have a 20 pack of washing up sponges, make sure you get through them first before making the swap to a sustainable alternative. Just by making one or two swaps you can reduce your environmental impact.
Remember to take your friends and flatmates with you too, try to encourage them to make a sustainable swap, and recommend your favourite products to everyone you know! With shops such as NADA becoming ever more popular and prevalent, we can all be encouraged to make more swaps and help to reduce our environmental impact.
We are really excited that NADA is in our wonderful city, and encourage everyone to take a look around!
With thanks to NADA for allowing us to take pictures of the store for the blog. You can visit NADA’s website here.