Grab your organic cotton tote, Dublin has a new eco-friendly lifestyle shop

As more devastating news regarding climate change continues to flood in, Pat Short aims to make sustainability even easier with her new eco-friendly lifestyle shop Reuzi.

The Amazon is burning, Iceland held a funeral for a melted glacier and our wildlife is disappearing at an alarming rate. It can be difficult to not feel defeated by the weight of the task ahead of us. However, small and continual steps forward are the only way we can move forward and Foxrock’s latest opening is here to help.

Related: Why the Amazon rainforest is burning and what you can do about it

Opening its doors on August 26 for the first time, Reuzi is a calls itself a “one-stop shop for plastic-free, eco-friendly, organic products”. Originally just online, their new premises has everything you need to be more sustainable, from organic charcoal plasters to organic fairtrade bamboo utensils and everything in between.

Montii Bottle, €22.99

With an emphasis on education, owner Pat Short aims to inform the local community about recycling and eco-living. “Education is the main pillar of what we do,” says Pat, and she plans to hold workshops on sustainability in the shop, teaching the community how to live better as well as shop better.

Born in Rio de Janeiro, Pat met and married Stephen Kane, a surfer from Monaghan while working in the Caribbean. It wasn’t until Pat became a mother that she became environmentally conscious. Noticing the sheer volume of waste the comes with family life Pat recalls thinking, “if just two adults and a tiny baby can generate so much waste, imagine an office or a school?”

Deciding to tackle the issue for her own family head-on, Pat explains that her end-goal was to “replace everything that can’t be recycled or composted with reusable alternatives”. Once she got the hang of things, she realised that there were so many learnings and products she could share with others. “So I decided to create Reuzi in 2018.”

Stojo The Collapsible Pocket Cup – blue, €15.00

Selling everything from reusable nappies and natural sunscreen to wooden bikes and rice husk cups, Reuzi also offers zero-waste starter kits for babies, health and beauty and cleaning. In total, there are 350 items for sale, all carefully researched and hand-picked by Pat and her team, as well as refill options of most household items.

As well as all that, Pat offers a sustainability audit for workplaces on how to reduce waste and plastic in the kitchen, cleaning supplies, marketing collateral and she then would report back on available alternatives.

With all that’s going on in our world, it’s time we all take action towards living a more sustainable life.

Feature image via Reuzi Instagram

Read more: Easy ways to make going back to school more sustainable

Read more: How to talk to your children about climate change

Read more: 10 things we learned from our visit to the recycling centre