“New Moon Refillery is redefining sustainability in Lakewood with their zero-waste, refill-first approach to everyday goods. Since launching, they’ve already diverted more than 2,500 containers from landfills and are helping their customers replace disposable items with reusable or compostable alternatives—like bamboo dish brushes, Swedish dish cloths, and toothpaste tablets. In 2024 alone, they refilled more than 16,000 ounces of product and saved nearly 900 single-use containers through refills. They’re also champions of local business and closed-loop systems, working with brands that take back packaging for reuse. And in true data-nerd fashion, they created a personalized ‘Refills in Review’ dashboard, giving customers a fun way to track their impact each year. New Moon Refillery is proof that small business can drive big environmental change—and they’re just getting started.”

“To make plastics, you need oil. To get oil, you have to extract it from the earth—emitting millions of tons of CO2 per year and stripping the land bare to lay pipelines. We take from the earth in this exploitative way just to make millions of plastic bottles of hand soap that go straight to a landfill.

This is the perspective I bring to reducing single-use plastics today. Why are we damaging the planet and using our precious resources in such wasteful ways?

I’ll be the first to say that plastic is necessary in many areas of our lives, such as the medical field. It’s also incredibly unnecessary in many parts of our lives, such as packaging.

So, let’s save our resources and carbon emissions for when we need them and find alternatives, like refill stores, for when we don’t.”