Abracada’vrac project
Abracada’vrac is a project within the Zero Déchet Lyon (Zero Waste Lyon) association, a local branch of Zero Waste France. It consists of a locator of bulk products in the Lyon Metropolitan area, France’s second largest city. A dedicated website allows users to locate nearby everyday products without packaging. This tool contributes to the reduction of waste, specifically of disposable plastic products, by informing local inhabitants the availability of bulk products.
Launched in 2015 thanks to Jeanne Urvoy, a young Lyon entrepreneur, Abracada’vrac was taken over by Zero Dechet Lyon in 2018. After two years of redesigning their website in collaboration with a group of volunteers, their new search engine was launched in April 2021. The site currently lists around twenty grocery stores in the Lyon region and over 7,000 bulk products. It also enables users to search for everyday products with no packaging, such as pasta, vegetables, dry fruit, washing powder, toothpaste etc..
The website is visited around twenty times per day, which could indicate the number of individuals leading a zero-waste approach. Consuming without packaging saves around 75kg of waste per person per year in the Lyon region and Abracada’vrac demonstrates that most everyday products already exist in plastic-free packaging and that there are readily available products which can replace ones of single-use, such as: plastic bottles, disposable menstrual products, toothbrushes, cotton buds, dry product packaging etc.
