Member Spotlight

Ray’s Reusables

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Ray’s Reusables is a shop in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia that offers customers local, packaging-free and refillable goods to help them live a more circular lifestyle.  The store also serves as a drop-off point for customers to recycle hard-to-recycle materials.

What is the value of a membership?

Membership offers opportunities for like-minded people to connect and collaborate. It’s not a membership that is restricted to businesses only, so it’s a great place for members of the community to connect with business owners and organizations.

What does a circular economy mean to your organization?

Circularity is about thoughtfulness for the entire lifecycle of the items that we interact with. It’s a clear forethought for what happens after the usable life of something and intentionality around a solution to keep it out of landfill.

How is your organization practicing circularity?

We think of circularity as a group effort, so we practice it not only internally, but also with our suppliers and customers. To give you some examples:

From our suppliers, we look for companies that offer: closed-loop returns for the bulk containers of product we buy from them, a return-to-be-responsibly-recycled program for their packaging, or local vendors who are able to drop and swap containers for re-use.

With our customers, we encourage people to bring their own containers for refills, act as a drop off spot for a number of niche recycling materials through our partnerships with local recycling companies, and offer up materials that might be used again by the community such as boxes or buckets.

Finally, internally we practice circularity by making sure we re-use or repurpose as much as we can. We ship online orders using only second hand packing materials, compost the off-cuts from production of our paperless towels, and by offering second-hand reusable shopping bags.

How can others advance the circular economy?

By not thinking they have to do it all at once!

Every person’s relationship to sustainable habits and participating in a circular economy is unique. I think the only advice that works for everyone is to try and cultivate an awareness and mindfulness about what things in your life you can’t reuse/repurpose/recycle. In other words, what are you tossing in your trash can? Once you really start focusing your attention on this you’ll start to see the areas where you can make changes that will work for you. Maybe these changes won’t be ones you can make right away, and that’s okay! Do the things that you can, and work towards the harder things bit by bit.