By Sara Bremer, Environmental Studies & Sustainability Major, School for Environment,
UMass Boston
Maria Vasco returns to UMass Boston to discuss how her vision became a reality by opening Boston’s first zero-waste store.
University of Massachusetts graduate Maria Vasco returned to her alma mater last week on Wednesday, November 10, 2021, to speak before a group of environmental studies and sustainability majors and College of Management students. A 23-year-old Environmental Studies and Sustainability major herself, Maria discussed the path to opening the innovative and environmentally-conscious store, Uvida, located in Boston’s North End neighborhood. In addition to the North End location, Maria announced at the seminar that Uvida would be opening a second storefront in her own East Boston neighborhood that weekend.
Uvida is Boston’s very first zero-waste store. While states like California and New York have already established a zero-waste market, Maria has broken the ceiling in Boston as a young female entrepreneur in the ever-growing “green market.” Uvida was originally an online-only endeavor, opening in 2019, and has since grown into two storefronts in Boston with plans to open a third location in Brookline early next year.
Maria recounted for us her journey. At 3 years old, she moved to Boston from Colombia with her parents, who would later become small-business owners. Beginning in 2016, Maria sought an education at UMass Boston, initially choosing to major in Political Science. As an optional elective, she decided to take an introductory course in Environmental Science. As fate would have it, this course opened Maria’s eyes to the importance of the natural world and our environment. In this class, she learned about the effect climate change was (and is) having on our planet, the plight of the world’s wildlife, and the exorbitant amount of plastic waste contributing to environmental degradation.
Unhappy with her current major and feeling drawn to the problem of plastic pollution, in 2017, Maria decided to change her major to ‘Environmental Studies & Sustainability.’ She described how impactful the experience of studying abroad in Spain during the Amazon Rainforest fires in 2019 was and how it helped compel her to take the initiative in the face of such seemingly insurmountable obstacles. She went on to say that plastic pollution not only affects wildlife but that the production of plastic itself requires the use of greenhouse gases, exacerbating the climate crisis and furthering the destruction caused by forest fires. She explained that often, plastic waste cannot even be recycled and that it ultimately ends up
being incinerated, contaminating the air we breathe.
Armed with concern, desire, and inspiration, and having always been inspired by her parents’ success as small-business owners, Maria decided to become an entrepreneur. She received the first-ever UMass Boston Entrepreneur Scholarship, which provided recipients with $5,000, as well as a mentorship with Dan Phillips, scholarship and Entrepreneurship Center founder and advisor in the UMass Boston Venture Development Center. The award helped her open her online store. After graduating in 2020, she opened the first storefront location, which offers plastic-free products, reused/plastic-free packaging for online orders, a refill station, plants, secondhand clothing, and an array of sustainably and locally produced goods created by small businesses in the Boston area. As stated on its website, Uvida’s mission is to “provide plastic-free products for improving home health to protect the environment from plastic waste.”