Sea Room rides rising tide of refill

In the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, a then-nascent Isle of Wight business – Island Refillery – put in the miles in their Nissan EV to keep the dream of sustainable living and tourism alive on the Isle of Wight. Fiona Taylor brought suds and smiles to residents and holiday rental businesses across the island – both much-needed services at the time!

So popular was the service that it paved the way for Fiona to open a permanent refill store in Bembridge, Sea Room, and, after the lifting of pandemic sanctions, Island Refillery stopped delivering to domestic clients across the island.

But it didn’t stop the islanders refilling; quite the contrary. Customers like Glynn Brasington, pictured here in 2021 dropping off his empties for a refill, have continued to refill their bottles with Fiona all the way into 2026!

In 4 months, Glynn estimates he gets through around 2 litres of washing up liquid (4 bottles) , 4.5 litres of washing detergent (3 bottles), 2 litres of fabric conditioner (2 bottles), and 500ml of hand soap across two bathrooms (2 bottles) – this means annually avoiding the need for 44 new plastic bottles.

Over the five years since he started – that’s 220 bottles avoided – about one and a half bathtubs full!

What Island Refillery and Sea Room show is that there is a huge appetite among the population to do the right thing for the environment when it is made convenient to do so. Nobody desperately “wants” to buy more and more plastic, but they can’t drop the habit if there aren’t viable alternatives.

Bio-D says on their website that, “if every person in the UK refilled and reused just one plastic bottle a month, it would prevent over 29,500 tonnes of plastic from ending up in landfill or being incinerated each year.” The equivalent of nearly 5000 elephants!

For an island county, the issue of ocean plastic is personal. Both Fiona and Glynn care about the beach they live near and would like to see the amount of plastic entering the ocean greatly reduced.

Thanks to Island Refillery, Sea Room and Fiona, the people of the Isle of Wight have options, and if you live on the Isle of Wight, or you’re taking a staycation there, you can choose to refill too.