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Artwork for episode 134 with Jane Martin of City to Sea

134 Jane Martin of City to Sea: powering refill & reuse on-the-go

To mark World Refill Day 2024, we talk to Jane Martin, the CEO of City to Sea, a campaigning non-profit with a mission to prevent plastic pollution at source.
World Refill Day is a global campaign to prevent plastic pollution and help people live with less waste. It’s a day of action each year, designed to create an alternative vision of the future and to accelerate the transition away from single-use plastic towards refill & reuse systems.
City to Sea develops and supports upstream solutions to give individuals, communities and businesses practical ways to replace single-use plastic in their lives, shopping baskets and operations.
City to Sea are specialists in behaviour change and creative communications and they develop innovations including the Refill app and Refill Return Cup to shift the dial from linear to circular.
For the past five years Jane Martin has been working as Head of Development at City to Sea, leading project work developing refill and reuse infrastructure in food-to-go and retail sectors, and she has recently been promoted to CEO.
Jane has broad experience across environmental, FMCG, retail, and culture sectors. In ten years’ time Jane wants to “look back and see a transformed circular economy where we value all the precious resources in the system and where we’ve abandoned our damaging throwaway culture.”
Jane summarises a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which categorizes packaging refill & reuse systems into four types: refill on-the-go, refill at home, return from home, and return on-the-go.
Each of those four categories has its own challenges around user needs, logistics, infrastructure and control systems. City to Sea focuses on refill on-the-go and return on-the-go, and we unpack those. Jane talks about some of the practical schemes that City to Sea has supported, and shares the insights and learnings gleaned so far.

Circular Economy Podcast - 104 Richard Burnett – Diversity and packaging innovation

104 Richard Burnett – Diversity and packaging innovation

Innovation and diversification is key to the success of James Cropper, a 6th generation family business, based in the English Lake District. Richard Burnett is Head of Technology and Innovation at James Cropper, a prestige supplier of custom-made paper products to many of the world’s leading luxury brands, art galleries and designers.

Richard oversees the Technology & Innovation (T&I) function at James Cropper, with projects including the Colourform moulded packaging proposition and the acquisition of Technical Fibre Products Hydrogen, a world leader in green hydrogen technology.

Richard led the implementation of the CupCycling programme, introducing the world’s first upcycling process for take-away coffee cups.

They discuss the challenges facing the packaging industry, and how James Cropper is both innovating and diversifying, with innovations in speciality paper, bespoke luxury packaging, and advanced non woven and electrochemical materials. We hear about developments in materials, in packaging design, and in manufacturing technology.

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 103 Algramo - Refill is the future

103 Algramo – Refill the future

Reusable packaging startup Algramo is going from strength to strength, and we hear from Brian Bauer and Chris Baker on why customers in Chile, the US and the UK are buying into this.
Algramo’s founder, Jose Manuel Moller, came up with a brilliant idea for reusable packaging to help what he called the poverty tax, paid by people who shopped at convenience stores. Those small, local stores sell everyday groceries and household staples, but often in small format packages. That means people often paid around 40% more, per gram or per litre, for the same product they could buy in a bigger format in a supermarket.
In the last couple of years, Algramo has gone from strength to strength, and has started a trial in the UK with Lidl, a German international discount retail chain that operates over 11,000 stores across Europe and the United States.
Algramo is working with Nestle, Unilever, and Walmart in the US, and launched a user-app in 2022. It’s also won several big awards, including the Most Innovative Reuse Company for Consumer Packaging Goods, at the 2022 Reusies awards.
We hear about the Lidl trial, a new project for ‘on the go’ reusable packaging, and hear about innovative packaging and dispensers for liquid home care products. We’ll learn more about what motivates customers to choose reuse, and how reuse rates improve as the new concept becomes ‘normalised’. We also discuss the potential for gamification, and how that could help popularise reuse.

Circular Economy Podcast 97 Alice Mah - Unpicking plastic propaganda

97 Alice Mah – unpicking plastics propaganda

IT’S EPISODE 97, and today we’ll be talking about plastics, a familiar circular economy topic, from someone with a someone with a less familiar background… Alice Mah is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, in the UK, and she’ll help us unpick the propaganda about plastics and their role in a circular economy
I came across Alice’s work when IEMA’s Transform magazine interviewed her about her latest book, Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It. I’m a member of IEMA, which is the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment. Alice unpacked some of the ways the plastics industry is trying to improve our perception of plastics, including how it tries to reframe the circular economy as a recycling issue. She highlighted other worrying aspects of how the petrochemicals industry is operating, and we’ll hear some of those.
Spookily, a few weeks later, on the same day I’d emailed Alice to invite her on, I was in the kitchen half-listening to BBC Radio 4’s sociology programme, Thinking Allowed, and up popped Alice, being interviewed about the ways the plastic industry uses its corporate power to influence our thinking around plastics.
Alice Mah holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and was Principal Investigator of the large-scale European Research Council project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry” from 2015-2020. Her research focuses on environmental justice, corporate power, and the politics of green industrial transformations. Her next book the is Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation.
In today’s conversation, I’ve asked Alice to help bust some myths around plastics and their potential role in a circular economy…
Myth #1 Plastics can support a Net Zero economy
Myth #2 Plastics are safe – in other words, it’s wrong to link plastics to health issues
Myth #3 Plastics are essential for our quality of life
Myth #4 Exporting plastic waste to low-income countries helps the country, and/or the local people, create value from that plastic
Myth #5 Plastic recycling can play an important role in the circular economy.

Circular Economy Podcast - Ep93 Guglielmo Mazza ReFuse Eco

93 Guglielmo Mazza – helping communities refuse packaging waste

Guglielmo Mazzà is an environmental engineer and social entrepreneur, and the co-founder and CEO of ReFuse, a social enterprise based in Beirut [Lebanon] that offers community-based solid waste management services. Guglielmo worked in development initiatives and humanitarian response in the field of water, sanitation, hygiene and financial inclusion, across Europe and Africa. His passion is combining equitable access to resources with ecosystem justice and restoration.
ReFuse has a mission to work with underserved communities, enabling them to sort recyclables and get rewarded for it. ReFuse says: “Where most people see a pile of waste, we see opportunities to improve the lives of vulnerable people. Secondary raw-materials have an unexploited value.”
Guglielmo explains some of the issues faced by many people living in Beirut, where approximately one-third of the population are migrants, with many living in temporary tented communities. Poverty, inequality and lack of government funds are big issues, and there is a lack of basic infrastructure, including a reliable electricity supply.
We hear how the ReFuse operation works, how they’ve expanded the range of materials they can recycle, and what they do with it all. We find out what motivates people to bring their recyclables along to the ReFuse stations – surprisingly, for many people, it’s not about the cash.

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 84 Jo Chidley - Reposit

84 Jo Chidley – Reposit – reusable packaging for consumer goods

Catherine Weetman talks to Jo Chidley, a circular economy expert, chemist, herbal botanist, and co-founder of TWO successful circular economy businesses, Beauty Kitchen (which is on a mission to create the most effective, natural and sustainable beauty products in the world) and the business we’re focusing on today, Reposit (the new brand name for ReRe). Reposit is a buy anywhere, return anywhere, reuse anywhere alternative to single-use packaging, helping retailers, brands and consumers to switch to Reuse & Refills across a wide range of products from milk to moisturisers and pasta to protein.

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 73 Tom Szaky - Loop

73 Tom Szaky – Loop – the convenience of prefill

Tom Szaky, founder of TerraCycle, tells us how the Loop reusable packaging platform is bringing the convenience of prefill to high streets everywhere. TerraCycle and Loop are tackling the root causes of waste, including single use and disposable items.

We hear why they chose prefill, and why reuse needs to ‘feel disposable’. Tom explains how they are helping big brands and retailers to make the business case, feel confident about moving forward, and scale up from pilots to in-store roll-outs.

Circular Economy Podcast - Episode 58 Rae Stanton - Lush Cosmetics

Episode 59 – Rae Stanton of Lush

Rae Stanton is the Earthcare Retail Lead for Lush Cosmetics UK and Ireland, using Permaculture principles to provide environmental best practice insight and guidance on packaging, sourcing regenerative ingredients and much more.
We find out how Lush embeds Permaculture and regenerative agriculture approaches into its business practices, and why Lush realised it needed to ‘own the packaging solution’ instead of relying on municipal recycling collections. Rae explains how Lush engaged its customers in designing ‘bring-back’ solutions, including asking them how much the reward should be.

Graphic showing bad, ok, good

Plastics – the good, the (less) bad and the ugly…

Do ‘headline-grabbing’ initiatives that are just a tiny bit ‘less bad’ risk undermining the circular economy? Instead, should we focus on new systems, products and materials that help regenerate resources, living systems and communities? Regenerative solutions could provide a clearer path forward and encourage people (and business and policymakers) to ‘do more good’.
These recent examples of plastic circular economy initiatives illustrate what we could describe as the good, the (less) bad and the ugly. They show why it’s important to consider the ‘big picture’ for circular and sustainability ideas, so you can think about how to maximise positive impact and avoid unforeseen consequences (and reputational risk!).

Circular Economy Podcast Episode 42 – Brian Bauer of Algramo

Episode 42 – Brian Bauer of Algramo

Brian Bauer explores how we can use circular approaches for plastic packaging, so we get the benefits of plastic, without the impacts of mismanaged plastic waste. Brian works with Algramo, a Chilean startup that refills product by the gram from vending machines. These refills provide better value for money as well as offering convenience and reducing waste. Algramo is working with Unilever, Colgate Palmolive and other brands, and is expanding to the US and Europe.
With Algramo, Brian focuses on connecting stakeholders to help catalyze reusable packaging systems on a globally significant scale.