Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019m not a big shopper, as you can imagine,\u201d she laughs.<\/p>\nPeople do still need to shop, however, and using refillable containers is one way they can help reduce harmful waste. That\u2019s where KnoxFill comes in.<\/p>\n
Customers in the Knoxville, Tennessee, area can place orders for products like shampoo, liquid castile soap, concentrated cleaner \u2013 and even dental floss. KnoxFill will then deliver the products \u2013 many of which come from local suppliers and family-owned businesses \u2013 in refillable containers. Later, customers can place the empty containers on their front steps, and KnoxFill will pick them up and replace them with fresh products in reused containers.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust like the milkman,\u201d Barnett says.<\/p>\n
Barnett, who holds a B.S. in sustainability science from Furman and is nearly finished with her Ph.D. studies in behavioral science from the University of Virginia, says that the union of those two fields led organically to her new business.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came to realize that most of the sustainability problems I wanted to solve had to do with human behavior,\u201d she says. \u201cI understood the problem really well, and I know how to analyze it from a systems-analysis perspective. But as we know, humans are embedded in every part of the process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Offering consumers a sustainable alternative can inspire more sustainable behavior, Barnett realized. KnoxFill is currently the only refillery in her area, although several have sprouted up elsewhere in Tennessee and other markets nationwide. Future hopes include moving the three-month-old business from her home into a brick-and-mortar location and expanding her staff beyond her current part-time employee.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are really hungry for alternatives,\u201d she says, \u201cand the community response has been overwhelming in the best possible way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raised on a hobby farm in central Ohio, Barnett \u201cloved the earth and really became embedded in it,\u201d she says. But it wasn\u2019t until she moved to the suburbs of Houston, Texas, as a high schooler that her environmental consciousness began to flower.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really started to see a lot of opulence, a lot of waste,\u201d she remembers. \u201cI became that kid in high school who was sorting through trash at the end of events and was really distressed by all the things we were throwing away.\u201d<\/p>\n
At Furman, sustainability science and the Shi Institute were fertile ground.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was like a little baby plant, and Furman nourished me,\u201d she says. \u201cThere were all of these students and faculty and staff who cared about the same things and helped push me forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
She met several energetic mentors who shared her passion, including Brannon Andersen, Betsy Beymer-Ferris, Bill Ranson, Shi Institute Executive Director Weston Dripps and Furman Farm manager Bruce Adams.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would not be the person that I am today without the community of people that I was fortunate enough to grow with and be with at Furman,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
After spending some time \u201cliving out of an oversized backpack\u201d in Spain, Costa Rica, Belize and Thailand as a trip leader for Wilderness Adventures and teaching at a boarding school in Switzerland, Barnett was ready to plant herself somewhere back in the Southeast. She made a list of five cities, picking Knoxville \u201ckind of on a whim,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Barnett, who balances managing her three-month-old company with her duties as an editor at Behavioral Scientist magazin<\/a>e, understands that refillable containers are not the only \u2013 or even the most important \u2013 way to solve our sustainability crisis.<\/p>\n\u201cThe place where we solve these problems is at the level of the system,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s with policy, and it\u2019s with the largest plastic polluters. It\u2019s not all about the individuals making better choices, even though I\u2019m helping them do that. We\u2019ve really got to change the system.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Michaela Barnett \u201915 has a couple of good reasons for wearing a T-shirt to work. One reason is that the shirt displays the name of her startup company, KnoxFill, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":9423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,17,37,18,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-centers-and-institutes","category-earth-environmental-and-sustainability-sciences","category-shi-institute-for-sustainable-communities","category-sustainability"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}