Laura Marston,

Interview by Mercedes Arnold

Laura Marston: My name is Laura Marston (she/her) and I started GoGo Refill in 2019. The journey started with me identifying that my family was using too many plastic water bottles. We'd go on car trips and we'd come back and there'd be too many plastic bottles. That was my first step, saying let's shift our behavior because we don't need to do this anymore. 

From there, I started doing a little bit of surface-level research about plastic and recycling. I generally started being more aware. Everything I learned was reinforcing the idea that plastic pollution is a real problem and I have been adding to it without thinking my whole life. Slowly, over a year I started shifting our habits in our household. I had two young kids at the time and I had “hacked” Portland and got as many plastic-free packaging items as I could and hit my limit. I started looking to maintain the same level of products that I had been using before to be effective. I wanted them to be affordable and reliable and consistent, but not wrapped in plastic. I had the idea of maybe I’ll leave this great job and start a bulk store. I told that joke so many times that it became a reality.

MVM: What was your first step when you decided, “Okay, I think I'm going to start this journey of reusing and becoming a more sustainable household”? 

LM: I didn’t start out with any particular goal in mind, it was more about habit-shifting. A lot of it revolved around grocery shopping. I started bulk shopping and getting everything I could package-free. I started counting how many times I touched single-use plastic in a day. That helped me to get a broader view of how plastics play a role in my daily life. It was eye-opening and it gave me a place to start. It was a lot of slow and steady changes, which I advocate for all the time. On the wall in our Portland store, it says Think Big, Start Small. You can start with one or two things and build on the practice of reducing. 

A lot of it can start with habit-changing in your home. You can start with smaller steps such as switching out paper towels for reusable towels and go from there. You don’t need to replace everything in your home, you can start with one area, like the kitchen sink. It has a lot of impacts, not having those plastic bottles go into the waste stream. 

MVM: What would you say to someone whose mindset is I'm one person, does it really make a difference to make a small change like that?

LM: This is older data, but as of our third birthday, which was last July, GoGo customers helped refuse over 120,000 plastic packages. That’s 120,000 plastic packages that we as taxpayers aren’t paying our waste management system to dispose of. Think about that one bottle of dish soap will last 50 times or more until it breaks, it’s not just the one time you refill it, it’s all the times you refill it, it has a compounding effort. We are making a difference, not only in what we are selling and refilling in our stores but also in who we’re impacting by talking about it not only as GoGo Refill but as a group of refillers. We are telling people that you can opt-out, you can consume less, and make a difference. There is a lot of doom and gloom about the climate crisis and it can feel overwhelming. This is something about your life you can control. You can live low waste. 

MVM: I appreciate the acknowledgment that it’s ok to start small and in a way that works for you and your family. 

LM: Yeah, and you can restart all the time and you can choose different ways of living a lower-waste life. 

MVM: You just opened your second store which is located in Brunswick, congratulations. How is it going so far?

LM: It’s been great, a lot of people would come down to South Portland from the Brunswick area and they were so excited when we opened. I’m looking forward to spending time making more connections up here [in Brunswick]. 

MVM: What are your plans for the summer with the GoGo van? 

LM: We don’t have any definite plans yet but because we have a home base in Brunswick, we can go even farther north and up into the midcoast. 

MVM: I want to point out that low waste is not accessible or sustainable for everyone. I think it’s important to recognize that and talk about it. Are there steps people can take if they have limited resources but want to help in recycling or reusing products?

LM: Number one, if you’re limited in a way, focus on what you need. We’ve had this conversation a lot of times where we ask if refilling specifically is more expensive. The answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no. As far as what we are doing, in the past, we have worked with the Greater Portland Housing Authority which has a weekly soup kitchen. We donated a ton of products that could be used and filled there. We’d like to do more and we do think about this a lot. It’s hard to compete with larger companies price-wise. We want to make reducing waste as accessible as possible, but I do think larger corporations have a responsibility to contribute to this conversation and take action. 

MVM: Right, I agree and do think larger companies need to contribute to the conversation and set a standard.

LM: In general, if you're looking at consumption through the lens of waste, if you consume less to throw less away, you end up spending less money. It can be an upfront cost versus long-term savings. 

MVM: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got to start small because I’ve got to convince the household to shift their habits.

LM: Yeah, that’s a big process change. It is hard. I'm always honest about this, being low waste is my personal journey. But it's not necessarily the priority of my whole family. 

MVM: Can you talk about what’s available at GoGo Refill? 

LM: All our cleaning products are biodegradable, non-toxic, and all are scented with only essential oils. There are a couple of hair products that we have that have synthetic fragrances in them, but that’s an interesting thing. There’s a full circle thing happening now, where for so long, it was like, oh, everything has to be natural, only natural fragrance, only essential oils. But there's a lot of variety of quality in the essential oil arena. There is also a lot of evidence to suggest that if you make a clean fragrance, even if it's a synthetic fragrance it may cause less reaction for a broader spectrum of people. It’s like just because something is natural doesn’t mean that someone isn’t going to have a reaction to it. So we’re wading through that right now. 

MVM: I read up on a few pieces of legislation that you’ve backed and worked with some state representatives on. Can you talk about your involvement with politics and championing laws and bills that increase or improve the environmental impact here in Maine? What does it mean to you? 

LM: It is super important to me. We talked about this earlier, but if someone is looking at living more sustainably, it doesn’t matter if only one person does it. There are two dangerous ideas about sustainability going on. One is that individuals can't make a difference and the other is that only individuals can make a difference. Both of those ideas are true and both of them are false. We need solutions that are easy for people to access individually. We also need to hold corporations accountable and government regulation so that we can make sure that large corporations aren’t dumping plastic into the world with no recourse at all. We need more multi-pronged solutions, this is a big problem that can’t be solved with just you refilling your dish soap. We need everyone to be able to access solutions at every level. 

It’s really important to me to be able to provide, encourage, and multiply people's individual daily sustainable actions while at the same time using the voice that we're creating through GoGo and whatever weight that holds, and using that to influence what happens on a larger scale. 

There were two pieces of legislation. One was born out of when we first opened. A lot of people expected us to have food, but at the time people weren’t allowed to bring their own containers to refill at the grocery store. I ended up talking to Maine State Representative from South Portland, Victoria Morales, and she was like, well, let's change it, let's make it so you can refill at the grocery store. From there we worked with her legislative assistant and wrote up a rule change and it got approved by a committee. Now you can bring your own container to your local food co-op or a grocery store and you’re able to get it refilled if that’s a service they offer.

The second piece is the Extended Producer Responsibility for Packaging law. This effort had been going on by others for decades and the people leading the change were the Natural Resources Council of Maine, Sarah Nichols. We said how can we help, what can we do? We helped to get businesses and customers to sign petitions and provide testimonials which we then presented to show support for the law. It ended up passing and Maine was the first in the nation to have this passed, it’s currently in the rulemaking process and not implemented yet. 

MVM: That’s great, it sounds like there was a lot of time and energy that went into getting that passed. I appreciate you using your voice to shed light on implementing programs to hold larger corporations accountable for recycling efforts. 

LM: My pleasure, it goes back to that starting GoGo Refill was step one of what I’m hoping to accomplish. Advocacy is a big piece of what I want to be able to do. 

MVM: Yes! I like this conversation about making small changes in your life at home to lower your environmental impact. It doesn’t have to be everything all at once. 

LM: Yes! We are hoping to reduce the barrier to entry with what we are doing. A real goal for us is to make sure that we understand that we’re asking people to do something new and different so it better be fun and a delightful experience. We don’t want it to be a chore. 

MVM: GoGo is definitely making it a delightful experience. Thank you, Laura!