Hi. I'm Laura. Welcome to Byrd's Filling Station.

I'm Laura. CPA, mom (and dog mom), hobby baker, plastic hater, to name a few. And I never thought I would be opening my own shop. 

The idea for a refill station or zero waste shop came about slowly. With a full-time finance job, two young children, and an aging dog, I found myself making more and more purchases online. Feeling bad about the amount of waste from these purchases, I kept the boxes and fillers in the hopes of reusing. The mound of cardboard grew larger and larger, and eventually took over an entire coat closet in the front of our home. So grew our family’s weekly hauls to the garbage bins for the plastic wrap and tape.

Enough was enough – there had to be another way to live and shop that didn’t produce as much waste. 

In 2018, the #PlasticFreeJuly campaign caught my attention. Enter a lot of internet sleuthing and searching. I didn’t have time to DIY everything, and even when I did, it wasn’t always the most effective. I came to learn more about plastic, and ways that plastic was sneaking into products we used and even into the food that we eat.

I started learning more about the Zero Waste movement, reading everything I could get my hands on. There were people who were able to fit their garbage into mason jars?!?  “That’s just crazy,” I thought. “It’ll never work with young kids,” I said. But if they can do something that extreme there was definitely a lot of room for improvement for us.  In August 2018, I challenged myself to avoid plastic at the grocery store. This proved to be a much more difficult task than expected, as it meant changes in some of our family’s favorite foods.  

For how difficult it was to find food without plastic, it was nearly impossible to find plastic-free personal care products in the big stores. Enter even more internet sleuthing and searching. There had to be products out there, and the internet provided. But buying them on Amazon seemed counterproductive, since it would come shipped in all that junk!

Toothpaste in glass jars, personal care products with zero packaging or in compostable kraftboard, refillable or reusable items, bamboo toothbrushes and silk dental floss, to name a few. Glass jars to refill soaps and detergents, containers to use when buying meat and cheese at the deli counters, bags for product or bulk dry goods; the options seemed endless. The downside was that each of these was from a different vendor… and who has time to shop at 20 different stores, even if they ARE online?   

Then came the idea of Byrd’s Filling Station. I knew there had to be a way to aggregate and showcase the great products that are out there to help people on the journey to reducing our waste. Awareness of our consumption is so important, but so is convenience.  We CAN have both. And for as far as we have come in 4 years, this journey is just beginning – we are constantly expanding to new products and showcasing ways to make life easier, cost less, generate less waste.

 

Here’s to phasing out single-use plastic in a convenient way!

Laura