A zero waste online delivery service launched only two months ago is aiming to change the way people shop and make sustainability as accessible as possible.

Based in Leyton, Top Up Shop delivers all household essentials such as food staples like pasta, rice and beans, cleaning products and even coffee. These are delivered in cotton bags, hand stamped with Top Up Shop’s logo, while liquids are in refillable recycled glass bottles.

Owner Ava Lyall said: “We're doing something totally new in the local area, delivering all of our products in reusable packaging that are simply collected and refilled when customers reorder, creating an entirely circular system and not a single drop of single use waste.

“Most importantly, we are a Waltham Forest only service at the moment because it felt really key to me that I started out and grew in the community I call home and grew up in myself.”

Read More

Top Up Shop was launched in the second week of April during the coronavirus pandemic to try and help the most vulnerable members of the local community, but since then it also been involved in donating non-perishable food to projects in East London to support young families in temporary housing.

Ava said: “I'm so proud of the initiative we have started and in just our first two months of business we have already saved over 150 single use plastic food packets from ending up in the bin, as well as over 50 plastic cleaning liquid bottles. We want to change the way people shop and make sustainability as accessible as possible.”

Asked why she would recommend her business to others, Ava said: “Top Up Shop really aims to make something that everybody wishes they could do more, shopping sustainably, as easy and accessible as possible.

“We know that even before the pandemic there could be any number of reasons why you might not be able to make it out to the bulk shops. Because we work in an entirely circular system we really do change the way you shop, no more fighting for plastic wrapped pasta at the supermarket, we deliver it straight to your door so you will never go without and you know for certain there’s no turtles in danger.”

If you wish to tell us about your favourite local shop or trader, or nominate your own business, simply go here.