Edinburgh has always been well served with ethical shops and as a small city with good public transport links it's always seemed easy to me to get to any of these shops whenever I want. Recently a few other ethical shops have opened to give us all an even wider choice.
The Eco Larder recently opened its doors on Morrison Street (conveniently near Haymarket station for those visiting Edinburgh), offering a range of products plastic free! You take along your own containers and can fill them up then weigh and pay. The product range is wide and includes toiletries and cleaning products all of which are sustainably produced and unpackaged, reducing single use plastic and waste. The Eco Larder has also set up the Plastic Free Edinburgh Badge Scheme which is encouraging local businesses to reduce their plastic use and offering a badge that can be displayed so that customers can know which businesses are doing their bit to recude plastic use!
If you're in Leith then Weigh to Go is your local equivalent of the Eco Larder, which is opening literally as I type this!
And in Newington there's The Refillery, which offers refills on a number of products so you just re-use your old bottles etc.
The SHRUB Co-op recently opened a swap shop in Bread Street where you can swap items or take items in to earn tokens to them swap for other items in the future. They also will accept money. SHRUB also offers creative upcycling workshops, bike repairs and a food sharing project. It's student run and most of the customers are students but they are actively trying to reach further out to non students.
These make a great addition to the existing ethical shops in the city which include:
Real Foods - there are two branches of this long standing ethical food shop in Edinburgh, one in Tollcross (which also offers a refill service for eco-friendly brands of cleaning materials) and a larger one in Broughton Street.
The New Leaf is the cooperatively run owned grocery store in the Meadows which sells organic foods and ethical cleaning products. It offers a refilling service on ecofriendly cleaning products.
One World Shop - another long-standing Edinburgh institution, the One World Shop sells fair-trade products including teas and coffees, chocolates and a wide variety of gifts including books, jewellery and toys.
Hendersons is another long standing institution, with a popular basement vegetarian cafe, a food shop and a vegan bistro restaurant.The cafe hosts poetry readings and other events.
The Forest Cafe (where I recently spent a week as poet in residence) offers a good selection of vegan and vegetarian food, free bread for people in need and a free shop. It also runs workshops and other events.
There are plenty of vegetarian restaurants in Edinburgh and probably other ethical stores I've missed off the list, but this is just an overview.
4 comments:
We are thankfully well served in Vienna too. I can't for the life of me understand people who drive 30 or 40 minutes to an out of town mega-supermarket in a so-called shopping city and sit for an hour in a traffic jam all the way back. Best of all they think they've saved money. And second best of all they've ended up with food containing some of the 8,000 additives that are used these days ranging from antibiotics to pesticide to god knows what.
It's becoming much more common. I know I taught the Three Rs, when I began teaching in 1981. It sure has rippled down too much. It's a slow process.
I think I have a proper notion of what it means to be an "ethical" shop although I have not heard that term used here where I live in the Pacific Northwest. It seems like a great idea and several options there.
I do know that here there are some businesses and enterprises which tout "Eco-friendly" when there is little or no scientific/practical evidence of that! And so a bit of buyer beware!!!
It sounds as if you've got a good variety of ethical shops in the city.
All the best Jan
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