Fill Good Inc – are we close to a refill revolution?

While Boris Johnson is busy reducing the size of Europe, his father, Stanley, is appealing to Europe to help us reduce the amount of rubbish we create.

This month, Environmentalists for Europe, the cross-party group co-chaired by Johnson senior, called on the EU to ban non-returnable bottles. Instead, the group said, consumers should be charged a 20p deposit, refundable when they take back the bottle. Or we should make all plastic bottles refillable.

Refilling isn’t a new idea, but it’s one whose time has come: instead of getting us to be green after we consume, by recycling, it intervenes earlier in the purchasing cycle (“precycling”) to tackle the hugely wasteful business of packaging.

A staggering 5.5bn household plastic bottles are not recycled each year – a far higher figure than the number of bottles recycled – while plastic-recycling plants are closing because they’re not financially sustainable. Local councils collectively have to shell out some £25m a year to dispose of the unrecycled plastic bottles, so we consumers effectively pay for them twice over.

With refilling, on the other hand, when you run out of a product, you either buy a low-cost refill pack, or take a container to a refill station in your local store.

It won’t work, argue the naysayers, even if it’s cheaper: too bothersome, too messy. Both Tesco and Asda have tried it in the past few years and abandoned it – artisanal bags of quinoa flakes in a health food shop are one thing, but pumping your own fabric conditioner is quite another. (At the very least, you need the space for it, and someone to mop up the spillages.)

However, the sceptics are wrong for two reasons. The first is that refilling is taking off all round the world - not just in the obvious places (California), but in shopping malls, DIY shops and even supermarkets in Berlin, Vienna, Naples and Oxford. Refilling herbs, grains and pulses has long been easy, but now you can self-dispense laundry and beauty products, olive oil, instant coffee and, in a local shop near me in London, even branded shampoo.

The second reason is the recent law on plastic bags, which has got consumers used to thinking about what they need to take when they go shopping. It is a short step from this to bringing along a plastic bottle. Some shops even invite donations of spare bottles, so you don’t have to bring your own. We might soon need a fourth R: reduce, reuse, recycle, refill.