The rules I set for myself were simple: seven days, all groceries purchased without single-use packaging. No cling film, no plastic bags, no tetra paks, no shrink-wrapped cucumbers. I could use my own containers, glass jars, cloth bags and beeswax wraps. Everything else had to come packaging-free from the shelf or the bulk bin.
Hamburg has a handful of dedicated zero-waste shops. The two I relied on most were Stückgut in Ottensen and Bei Freunden in Eimsbüttel. I supplemented these with the weekly farmers' market on Isemarkt and one trip to the Ökomarkt in the Schanzenviertel. Here is what I learned.
Day one: the jar audit
Before buying anything, I spent Sunday evening collecting every reusable container in my kitchen. I ended up with eleven glass jars of varying sizes, four cotton produce bags, a large tote and two stainless steel tins. It felt like enough. It was not.
The first real lesson came at Stückgut on Monday morning. Bulk bins work beautifully for dry goods—oats, rice, lentils, pasta, flour, nuts. You weigh your jar at the counter, fill it, weigh it again, and pay for the difference. The process is calm, almost meditative. But liquids and semi-liquids are harder. Olive oil, for instance, is dispensed from a tap into your own bottle, which is fine if you remembered to bring one. I had not. I bought a reusable glass bottle on the spot for 3.80 euros, which slightly undermined the spirit of the exercise.
The cost question
By Wednesday, a pattern had emerged. Staples—grains, legumes, spices, baking ingredients—were roughly comparable in price to their supermarket equivalents, and in some cases cheaper. Organic rolled oats at Stückgut cost 2.90 euros per kilo; the same product at a nearby Edeka, in a 500-gram cardboard box, worked out to 3.40 per kilo. But specialty items skewed expensive. A zero-waste dish soap refill cost nearly twice what a plastic bottle of Frosch would at Budni.
"People assume we're more expensive across the board, but on staples we're competitive. The difference is that you only buy what you need. No one leaves here with 800 grams of quinoa going stale because the packet was too big." — Maren Schlüter, co-founder of Stückgut, Hamburg-Ottensen
My total grocery spend for the week came to 68.40 euros. In a typical week I spend around 55 to 60 euros. The premium was real but smaller than I had expected, and some of it was attributable to the learning curve—buying containers I already needed, making extra trips because I had forgotten something.
What was hard
Cheese. Fresh cheese without packaging is essentially impossible unless you go to a market stall and ask them to place it directly into your container. Most stalls were willing, but a few looked at me as though I had asked them to perform surgery. Sliced bread was similarly awkward; I ended up buying whole loaves from a bakery and slicing them at home.
The biggest practical obstacle, though, was geography. Stückgut is a fifteen-minute cycle from my flat; Bei Freunden is twenty. A conventional supermarket is three minutes on foot. Zero-waste shopping demands more time, more planning and more cycling. On Thursday evening, tired after work, I nearly gave in and bought a wrapped sandwich from a kiosk. I ate an apple instead.
What was easy
Fruit and vegetables at the Isemarkt were entirely straightforward. Stallholders are accustomed to customers bringing their own bags, and loose produce is the norm. Eggs came in a returnable cardboard tray. Herbs were handed over in bunches with no wrapping at all. This felt like the most natural part of the week—the way grocery shopping probably worked for everyone before the plastics revolution.
Coffee, surprisingly, was also easy. The roastery on Schulterblatt fills your own tin or bag without hesitation. Milk was the one dairy product I managed packaging-free, thanks to a local farm that sells in returnable glass bottles at the Ökomarkt.
The waste audit
At the end of seven days, I weighed my non-recyclable waste. It came to 40 grams. In a normal week, my household produces roughly 600 to 700 grams. The reduction was dramatic, but it came at a cost in time and convenience that I suspect most people would not sustain long-term without structural changes—more zero-waste shops, more bulk options in conventional supermarkets, more deposit schemes for everyday products.
Would I do it again?
Not as a strict exercise, no. But the week shifted my habits in ways that have stuck. I now buy all dry staples from bulk bins. I carry a produce bag in my jacket pocket. I have not bought cling film since. These are small changes, and they will not solve the packaging crisis on their own. But they are changes I can sustain, and they started with a week of paying attention.