Today we’d like to introduce you to Michaela Barnett.
Hi Michaela, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I’ve been obsessed with trash my whole life.
When I was a kid, my mom would pull our giant, purple, 90s conversion van over to the side of the road a few times a week to dig through other people’s trash. We didn’t necessarily need anything in those piles, but she just couldn’t stand all of that good stuff going to waste. And there was always a lot of good stuff out in the trash. Then and now, people threw away treasures – items with plenty of life left in them, destined for a landfill or worse.
In high school, horrified by all the waste, I started a recycling program at my school and spent my time during special events sorting through the stuff everyone else was throwing away. In college as a Sustainability Science major, I helped start a composting program in our main dining hall. I spent many lunches standing amidst the waste bins trying to help other students sort through the leftovers on their plates.
Then I worked in recycling and food recovery. And then I went back to school to get my Ph.D. studying waste because I still didn’t understand why we made so much of it and how to fix the problem. It turns out, most of my life I was looking at trash the wrong way. I was always focused on downstream solutions – things like recycling better or composting more. In other words, how to deal with waste after it’s already wasted. I’ve learned since that we have to zoom further back and make sure that all that waste is never created in the first place.
Most people know some of the statistics about our waste problem: Projections that plastic pieces will outnumber fish, microplastics being found everywhere from fresh fruit to isolated mountains to the human placenta, and single-use consumer items being connected to environmental degradation and climate change along every part of their supply chain long before they hit the trash.
And most people are doing the best they can, but the system sometimes makes it hard to connect our values with our actions. The biggest producers of household and personal care items are also some of the biggest polluters on the planet.
I created KnoxFill to offer better alternatives to wasteful products in our community. When I started on my less-waste journey, I didn’t know where to start and wished we had a local shop that sold zero waste goods. We all need things like soap and toothpaste – but we don’t need the single-use packaging these products usually come in!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I’ve been totally blown away by the community’s response and their eagerness to adopt this new model of getting goods. And no, it hasn’t been totally smooth, but that’s okay because I built resiliency for failure into the business. I try to fail a little bit every day so that I can learn, grow, and get better.
This is my first time running a business, so there’s going to be plenty I don’t know or I don’t nail the first time. What’s neat is that my customers are growing alongside me. They got the early iteration of KnoxFill branding, and they’ll see us when we move into a storefront and beyond!
As you know, we’re big fans of KnoxFill. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
KnoxFill provides personal and household goods in refillable, reusable containers. We operate using the milkman model: We provide full containers to customers, who return their empties to be cleaned, sanitized, and refilled.
Sustainability isn’t just one of our values – it IS our value. Sustainability underscores every single business decision we make, and I’m proud to have a company that prioritizes the planet and people over profit. We source locally whenever possible, offset our transportation emissions through a partnership with a locally managed forest, and have a low waste supply chain.
Our products perform as well or better as traditional alternatives and are made by phenomenal makers who care about what they’re putting IN the products, not just what they’re getting out of them.
Contact Info:
- Email: knoxfillshop@gmail.com
- Website: knoxfill.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knoxfill/
- Facebook: facebook.com/KnoxFillShop
Image Credits
Brittany Sidwell Photography
