IT IS difficult to articulate quite how powerful and happy these labels make me feel.

They show that there is washing up liquid, porridge oats, a muesli base and mixed fruit in an assorted collection of containers from home.

So just day-to-day stuff.

Not sexy or remotely Instagrammable in the classic ‘Here’s a funkily angled representation of my espresso martini / vegan supper / desirable life which is here to make you feel jealous’.

The reason these items make me feel so powerful is because it is precisely the individual powerlessness many of us feel when we have to buy groceries.

We will almost always buy them in a supermarket. And there we are faced with aisle after aisle of packaging: shiny plastic bottles, crackly plastic bags, smooth plastic boxes. It’s a heck ton of plastic.

Within about five miles of where I live are several small Co-op supermarkets, one large and two small Tesco stores, one large and two small Sainsbury’s and two large Waitroses.

When the washing up liquid ran out – I would go and buy another plastic bottle of the stuff. When the muesli ran out – I would go and buy another plastic bag of the stuff.

I didn’t have a choice. It’s how you have to buy things if you don’t live somewhere like Brighton or Bristol, near a crochet-your-own quinoa zero waste store.

But now – thank the Lord of Sustainability! A refill store has opened in the Mid Sussex town where I live and I cannot tell you how much I love it. Full disclosure: I loved the idea so much, I wrote a press release for them (for free) to help with publicity.

The day Scrapless opened, I burst through the door, having carefully hoarded my old containers and filled up cleaning liquids, cereals and dried fruit with a surge of smugness and, most importantly, PERSONAL POWER!

Frankly, the supermarkets have made minimal efforts to do much to allow customers to refill containers. The major players have introduced ‘trial’ sustainability stores but it feels pretty token.

Most fruit and vegetable sections are still a reflective undulating sea of plastic while there’s a nod at ‘sustainability’ by making the bags you fill with loose produce ‘compostable’. I haven’t tried them out to see how long that takes – I’ve sewed my own bags and try to use those.

But it’s easy and lazy to lay the blame at the doors of large companies with shareholders to satisfy and complex businesses to run.

We have all allowed ourselves to be persuaded by supermarkets that we must shop there and buy everything in once place for “convenience”, which, let’s be brutal, appeals to many people’s innate laziness.

Interestingly, the cost of buying from a zero waste roughly matches the products in a supermarket – which are nearly always encased in packaging or cardboard.

This is how some of the products I bought compare with Waitrose, the main supermarket nearby:

Scrapless organic muesli base 25p per 100g / Waitrose 36p per 100g = CHEAPER

Scrapless rolled oats 20p per 100g / Waitrose (Quaker oats) 20p per 100g = SAME PRICE

Scrapless luxury mixed fruit 50p per 100g / Waitrose vine fruit (doesn’t say ‘luxury’) 45p per 100g = SLIGHTLY MORE BUT MAY BE A HIGHER SPEC PRODUCT

We kid ourselves we’re “too busy” to shop in separate independent shops. Some people might be if they are working full-time with young children. But even then, let’s be honest, we all find time to do what is important to us.

Many of us find sizeable chunks of time every day to stare at Instagram feeds of other people’s fantasy curated lifestyles, time we could perhaps use more consciously.

But now we’re truly deeply hooked into the plastic-wrapped all-under-one-roof bulk-buying approach to grocery shopping, will we ever return to filling bags and other containers with what we need?

Planet Earth to humans: ‘You really don’t have a choice’.