MAPLEWOOD, NJ — Good Bottle Refill Shop, New Jersey’s first zero-waste refill shop, with locations in Maplewood and Montclair, expanded into food refills in its Springfield Avenue location in Maplewood.
Maplewood welcomed the expanded store with a festive ribbon-cutting on Saturday, Nov. 13. Good Bottle owner Deanna Taylor-Heacock officially cut the blue ribbon — which she pledged to reuse, of course — flanked by Mayor Frank McGehee, Deputy Mayor Dean Dafis, Township Committee members Vic DeLuca and Nancy Adams, Springfield Avenue Partnership Executive Director Nicole Dooskin Wallace, and assistant township administrator Bailey Barnett.
Good Bottle first opened its doors in 2019 in Maplewood with a selection of personal care and household refills like shampoos, conditioners and cleaning supplies, as well as zero-waste products like un–paper towel and beeswax wrap. With its expansion into food refills, customers can now also refill pantry staples, such as pasta, rice, beans, spices, cooking oils and local honey, with more food items arriving throughout the coming months.
Walk into a traditional grocery store and it’s filled with single-use plastic, only 9 percent of which actually gets recycled. The rest ends up in landfills and the oceans.
“I started this company because, like many of you, I was fed up with all the waste my family was producing. I wanted a more sustainable way to buy the products we so often used and threw out each month,” Taylor-Heacock, a Maplewood resident, said.
In the United States, 2.5 million plastic bottles are thrown away every hour — about 42,000 per minute, or about 695 per second. Research shows that plastics cause more than 80 percent of the negative effects on animals associated with ocean trash.
Photos Courtesy of Nicole Dooskin Wallace
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