About Exist Green
Exist Green is Omaha’s refill market for Grocery, Herbals, and Essentials, housed in a solar-powered 1907 home in the Dundee neighborhood. Pantry staples, loose-leaf tea, apothecary-style herbs, home refills, local produce, and practical plastic-free goods all live under one roof, built around a simple idea: you should be able to buy only what you need, in quantities that make sense, without the usual packaging waste.
Why this store exists
Most shopping is built around products that move easily through modern supply chains, whether or not their packaging, ingredients, or full footprint make much sense. Exist Green was built as a practical alternative, where people can buy only what they need and bring home goods screened more carefully for both people and planet.
The store is organized around Grocery, Herbals, and Essentials. That means pantry staples and seasonal produce, loose-leaf tea and apothecary-style herbs in bulk, and the practical home and body goods that carry lower-waste choices into the rest of daily life.
Beyond refill
Refill is one visible part of the model, but not the whole of it. At Exist Green, the work also goes further upstream, through housemade production, reusable farm bins, bulk formats, and select closed-loop supplier systems that reduce packaging before it ever reaches the shelf. That means reuse is not only something a customer sees at the counter, but something built into how products are sourced, handled, and moved through the store from the start. The shop also offers free compost drop-off for customers through a partnership with Hillside Solutions, closing the loop on food scraps and compostable end-of-life products.
But packaging is only part of the story. Exist Green also applies a more careful screen to what is inside the container, and that is where the store’s standards begin to diverge even more sharply from the usual retail model.
A more careful screen
Exist Green follows the precautionary principle in what it stocks. Packaging matters, but so does what is inside the container. We do not wait for years of regulatory lag before asking harder questions about ingredients, materials, and upstream impacts, and we favor simpler, more thoughtfully made goods built around plant botanicals, minerals, and lower-waste systems from the start.
About the Founder
From remediation work to retail, the shift was less a departure than a move upstream.
Before opening Exist Green, Leigh spent more than a decade in environmental engineering, focused on contaminated soil and groundwater, and continues to hold a Professional Engineer (PE) license in Civil Engineering. With a BS in Environmental Engineering from Colorado State University and an MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley, that work raised a harder question, not only how to clean up damage after the fact, but how to move earlier in the chain, before so much waste, exposure, and unnecessary material became normal in the first place.
Exist Green grew out of that shift. It is a store built around buying only what you need, screening goods more carefully from the start, and making lower-waste, more thoughtful choices easier to carry into daily life.
Partnerships + affiliations
Exist Green is a proud member of Plastic Pollution Coalition and an affiliate of Beyond Plastics, two organizations working to end plastic pollution through upstream solutions, policy, and community action.
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