AN Oxfordshire farm worker who got fed up with single-use plastics has started her own business selling plastic-free tea, pasta, rice, fruit and nuts.

Katie Herring, from Faringdon, will be launching her pop-up refills shop at The Mix community space in Wantage on the first Sunday of the month beginning on July 1 – helping locals do their bit for the international Plastic Free July campaign.

The former pupil at King Alfred’s school in Wantage, who has learnt to make bread, beer and elderflower cordial to cut down on waste, decided to set up the business because there was nothing like it in the area.

The 30-year-old said: "I just got so fed up with having to buy everything in plastic when it’s been made clear by programs like Blue Planet the damage it’s doing to our environment.

"When you visit the supermarkets it’s incredibly hard to just get vegetables without plastic let alone things like pasta, rice and tea. Even things that appear to come in paper usually have hidden plastic in them, it’s so frustrating."

Miss Herring, who now works at Roves Farm near Faringdon, was also inspired by the year she worked at local veg co-operative Cultivate, selling plastic-free, locally-grown fruit and vegetables at markets around Oxford.

This led her to discover SESI Refills, an Oxford social enterprise run by husband and wife Rina Melendez and Paul Godden which sells packaging-free foods and detergent refills but only at their market stall in East Oxford.

After she helped set up a SESI detergent refill station at The Mix last year, Miss Herring said food refills seemed like the natural next step.

In May, she set up a Facebook page for her new business Scoop and was inundated overnight with requests from as far away as Cheltenham to come and run her pop-up stall.

She has now booked The Mix for the first Sunday of every month starting in July and hopes to be popping up at other local venues soon.

Scoop will sell more than 20 different dried products including Jeeves and Jericho English breakfast tea, fusilli pasta, walnuts, dried apricots and rice.

According to the Plastic Free July Foundation, more than 2 million people in 159 countries will join this year's month of action to cut down on single-use plastics.

For updates on Scoop see facebook.com/scoopzerowaste