City to Sea ends ten-year operation
Environmental charity City to Sea has ended ten years of campaigning due to ‘the scarcity and competitive nature of grant funding and difficult economic times for corporate partners’.
The social enterprise’s closure rounds off a decade of transformative campaigning to stop plastic pollution at source and encourage a culture of reuse and refill, with its legacy including several UK ‘milestone policy wins’ such as bans on plastic cotton buds, single-use plastic cutlery and plates and polystyrene takeaway packaging. City to Sea’s flagship Refill app, launched in 2016 and now covering 370,000 refill stations worldwide, has been downloaded over 750,000 times and is estimated to have prevented 100 million single-use plastic bottles from entering waste streams annually. Its city-wide reuse systems have achieved a 97% return rate for single-use coffee cups, demonstrating ‘the viability of scalable reuse solutions’.
As the charity ceases operations it does so with a clear message — ‘The fight to end plastic pollution is far from over’ — and calls on Government and industry to ‘step up for reuse and be on the right side of history’.
Jane Martin, CEO, City to Sea, comments on the conclusion of a decade’s work: "We're incredibly proud of what we've achieved. When we started, refill and reuse were nowhere to be seen in strategic roadmaps and business plans. Since then, we’ve witnessed real shifts with city-wide reuse initiatives across the UK and upcoming EPR and DRS legislations. But despite growing public demand for reuse, the reality is that underfunding, lack of enabling regulation and a system still optimized for single-use have made our mission as a non-profit increasingly unsustainable. The new reuse economy desperately needs bolder commitments from governments, brands and retailers. They need to be on the right side of history: It’s time to turn talk into action, with deeper investment, legally binding regulation and cross-sector collaboration.”
By Rosie Greenaway, editor