Cape Town’s latest shopping experience, a synthesis of Long street style and sustainable shopping, opened with a phenominal celebration on Wednesday 4 Feb, with late night shopping hours.
As more people choose to turn their environmental ethics into action, 210onlong offers an innovative, vibrant experience for conscious retailers and consumers, in Cape Town’s creative heart, Long street.
The run down Baobab Mall has been lovingly recycled, using eco-friendly building techniques wherever possible, from the bricks (recycled) to the paint (organic, non-toxic), cement (lime rather than cement), timber (registered forests) and finishings (non-toxic varnish, indigenous tree etc.). The result is a bright, elegant shopping mall with more than 15 varied retailers all with a percentage of their products respecting the people and materials that create the things we like to buy.
Miki Clark, one of the owners, said: “We’ve used as many eco-friendly products while building as possible, and we’ve invited stores to open up in here that have the same sustainable ethics we do. A percentage of everything sold here is either eco-friendly, organic, recycled, subscribe to fair trade principals or are made locally. We are developing the mall in phases, and although it’s not entirely sustainable yet, we aim to eventually get it functioning completely off the grid.”
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