Siân Berry, the Green candidate for Mayor of London, will tomorrow open the first shop in London to ask its customers to bring their own packaging, and has pledged to "take sides" with local London business against multinational corporations. UnPackaged is a new organic grocery shop in Amwell, Street, Islington, where shoppers will be able to fill up their own boxes, tins and jars with organic and fair trade tea, coffee, rice, cereal, fruit & veg, environmentally-friendly cleaning products and other household goods.
Siân will open the shop by cutting a ribbon of 213 plastic bags, the number used annually by the average British person, then join UnPackaged founder Catherine Conway plus other guests and media for a Buck’s Fizz breakfast.
To promote local business and defend our diverse high streets, Siân has pledged to use new Mayoral planning powers to require that all new large business developments provide affordable premises for small enterprises, amounting to at least 50% of the total trading space.
Siân said: "It’s a real honour to be invited to open Unpackaged. It’s a brilliant idea – no-one likes wasting money on throwaway packaging, and here you don’t have to. Hopefully one day we’ll be able to buy everything like this.
"Small businesses like Unpackaged help create the kind of diverse high streets we enjoy shopping in. They tend to generate more enjoyable jobs with better wages, and locally owned businesses mean profits doing good within the local economy, rather than being whisked away into shareholders’ pockets.
"We should be celebrating hundreds of success stories like this, but for that we need politicians to take sides and put vibrant local enterprise firmly ahead of predatory multinationals."
"One thing I would do as Mayor is make sure that all new large developments made half their floor space available for small businesses at affordable rents. We need to defend our high streets, not let them be abandonded or swallowed up by identikit shopping centres with the same, boring shops in every one."
Catherine Conway, founder of Unpackaged, said: "Unnecessary packaging is a waste of resources and a waste of money. Unpackaged is about rewarding people for reusing their containers and doing their bit to tackle our wasteful culture. We all know that packaging increases the cost to the environment and consumers’ pockets. At Unpackaged, we take the costs of packaging out of the equation and help people save money and the environment."
The project is also supported by Jonathan Dimbleby, who is the president of the Soil Association and Liam Black of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Foundation.