133 Re-Action – repurposing: a new life for unwanted stuff

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.

This is the 4th and final episode in the special 5th Anniversary mini-series featuring the Re-Action Collective, and we’re focusing on repurposing – using creativity and craft skills to breathe new life into unwanted outdoor gear, clothing and workwear. We’ll hear from the founders of two small repurposing businesses: First, Jen Dickinson, founder of Dirtbags Climbing, an upcycling workshop in the English Lake District, which turns retired outdoor textiles into hand-made bags. And secondly, Beccy Evans, founder of Utilifolk, who gives things fresh appeal and new life by re-working unwanted garments that are no longer fit for their original use, and makes new pieces from preloved and remnant textiles. Ironically, nearly every outdoor gear brand uses sophisticated marketing to hijack our brain chemicals, encouraging us to buy yet more stuff to do the things we love, to excel and enjoy them. And yet, those same things, when discarded, are destroying the very essence of the places and living things we love so much. We discuss the ethos and design principles for their businesses, why we need to avoid sucked into the ‘fast-fashion’ and ‘compartmentalising’ approaches of brands that want to sell more stuff, and how repurposing can help people create their own identity, instead of looking like they’re wearing other people’s stuff. Rebecca Heaps, founder of Tentshare, who we met in Episode 131, says “when we buy 2nd hand, the earth breaths a sigh of relief” – and I think that applies to repurposed things, too. Everything we do to keep our clothes, tools and equipment alive is a way to sustain life on earth – for us, and for the future of our living world. And of course, emotional engagement and well-crafted kit helps Re-Action's mission to make the outdoors more affordable and accessible.

This is #3 in the 5th Anniversary mini-series featuring the Re-Action Collective, and focuses on repairing. We hear from the founders of three UK businesses that are helping people repair their outdoor clothing and equipment: Rosanna Watson at Snowdonia Gear Repair, Becky Kirby at Sheffield Clothing Repair, and Vicky Balfour of Vicky Bikes. The strapline for this episode was inspired by Rose Macario, former CEO of Patagonia Inc, who wrote a blog back in 2015 declaring that ‘repair is a radical act’. But repairing and caring for our things used to be the norm, until we’ve gradually been persuaded to treat our stuff as disposable, and to think that newer is always better. But many of us are discovering that’s not true, and that repairing, customising and caring for our clothing and equipment is better for us, for our wallets, and for our futures. Now, repairing is having a renaissance, with millions of people finding ways to do DIY repairs, or find repairers with specialist skills and the relevant spare parts. We speak to the founders of 3 businesses to discover what motivates people to repair, why repaired items can be better than replacements, and what to look out to make sure your gear is easy to care for and repair.

This is #2 in the 5th Anniversary mini-series featuring the Re-Action Collective, and focuses on sharing and ‘pay to use’. We hear from the founders of three startups enabling people to have convenient and affordable access to high-quality outdoor gear: Anna Smoothy from Cirkel Supply, Rebecca Heaps from Tentshare and Bruce Leishman from KitUp Adventures. The strapline for this episode – serving more people with less stuff – was inspired by Anna Smoothy at Cirkel Supply. I loved their aim, to serve more people with less products. and that aligns with one of my favourite phrases at the moment, about the need for businesses to do better, with much less. Sharing, including ‘pay to use’ systems, is one of the 3 key circular economy strategies that I encourage businesses to focus on. Sharing can be a catch-all term for commercial arrangements that make it easy to use something for a short period, rather than owning it. These systems can help organisations to serve other organisations, to serve individuals, or for people to serve other users. For decades, we’ve been happy to rent houses, holiday accommodation, cars, skis and bicycles, movies and more - and now people are branching out into other categories. Rental and subscription services are popping up for technology, fashion and accessories, home appliances, furniture and more, avoiding the need to buy things you aren’t sure you’ll want to use over the long term. Often, these are disruptive startups using online platforms to provide convenient, flexible ways to access high-quality brands at affordable prices. Sharing is really coming to the forefront, in particular for younger people who want access to the stuff they need and see ownership as a burden, not a benefit. Global revenue growth for sharing and renting is forecast to grow at 30% each year, and is key to helping us do much more, with much less. In other words, we get more use – or productivity – from underutilised assets – meaning we need fewer of them in the overall system. This is sometimes referred to as Decoupling. (The UN defines Absolute Decoupling as “a situation in which resource productivity grows faster than economic activity (GDP) and resource use is absolutely declining.”)

It’s now 5 years since I started the podcast, and to celebrate, I’m doing a 5th anniversary mini-series. I’ve invited several guests from the Re-Action Collective, a group of circular economy pioneers in the outdoor sports sector. Over the next few episodes, we’ll be hearing from them and exploring 3 different types of circularity – sharing, repairing and repurposing. The Re-Action Collective was formed in 2022, by Gavin Fernie-Jones and his friend, Heather Davies. We met Gavin back in Episode 72, talking about One Tree at a Time, a circular social enterprise to repurpose outdoor gear and ski-wear and to share value with the community and nature. In this episode, we’ll meet Gavin’s co-founder, Heather Davies, a freelance sustainability-focused content creator and communications trainer. Heather is motivated by a love of nature and the outdoors, and she works with a range of organisations, helping them communicate their sustainability stories and strategies, without greenwashing. She also offers training, including carbon literacy courses. The Re-Action Collective is all about Making the outdoors more affordable and accessible, and over the next few episodes, we’ll meet some of the member organisations, with business models based on sharing, repairing and repurposing. Heather and Gavin formed Re-Action to challenge product marketing that tells us we need shiny new, highly technical kit to access the outdoors. They say “We live in the outdoors and we know this isn’t true. We also know a lack of access to basic outdoor kit and absence of community are barriers to people getting outside and active for the benefit of their physical and mental health.” The Re-Action Collective wants to amplify the voice and impact of circular economy pioneers in the outdoor sports sector, for example running, cycling, climbing, surfing, sailing and snow sports. Member organisations rescue products and revive them through repair, rebranding and repurposing. They then redistribute items through resale, rental and donation and reallocate profits to regenerate the outdoors. Re-Action is focused on community-first solutions and wants to empower citizens to be more mindful about how they buy, maintain and dispose of their outdoor clothing and equipment. We’ll hear how the collective works in practice, and how they’ve developed ways to avoid the pitfalls of shared interest groups that end up being hard to engage with, because they generate too much information and conversation.

How do we draw people towards a deliciously sustainable future? In this episode, we’re going off at a slight tangent: to explore how we can bring people into this world, to feel they have agency and to see an exciting, meaningful future where we do better, with less. We’re going to hear about a way of telling stories – that could be fiction to help people understand circular solutions, or it might be stories to help them imagine how circular products and services work in real life, helping them see how that’s more fulfilling than buying yet more stuff and adding to the problems of waste and pollution. Alex Holland is the Founder of SolarPunk Stories, and has worked as a journalist in the UK, Venezuela and India. Alex has an MA in Leadership for Sustainable Development and created the world's first Tea Pub which was also Crowdcube's most-shared startup. SolarPunk is a much more optimistic genre than dystopian fiction – it’s more like the Thrutopian concept set out by Professor Rupert Read in an article for the Huffington Post, a few years ago. Utopias are too fantastical, whereas dystopias can be useless, even dangerously doom-mongering. Instead, we can create thrutopias: stories that help us see a way through the challenges we face, that help us build a vision for the future we want to be part of: a regenerative, fair and inclusive future that we can be proud of. Stories that help us to imagine, to feel what it would be like, and to design the political and economic systems to get us through.

Tara Button is the founder and CEO of Buy Me Once, a platform which helps people buy the longest-lasting products on the planet. If you’ve heard me talking about the 3 essential strategies for circular businesses, you’ll know that one of those 3 strategies is Keeping things in use for longer, through durability, repairability and resellability. I get frustrated by how difficult it is to find good examples of companies doing this, and so it was brilliant to discover Buy Me Once, which is all about finding products that meet that criteria and helping people find them. Back in 2015, Tara was a frustrated advertising creative, tasked with increasing the chocolate consumption of children, when the gift of an heirloom cooking pot sparked the idea of Buy Me Once. The platform went spectacularly viral in 2016, allowing Tara to leave Ad Land. Since then, Buy Me Once has partnered with 100s of ethical brands to help consumers buy for the long term, for a wide range of products from kitchenware to bedlinen, home furnishings to electronics, and for clothing. Tara explains what led her to start Buy Me Once, and the ethos underpinning the choice of featured brands and products. We hear what is driving the push for more durable, repairable products, and how the feedback from customers can help brands to improve their products. Tara has also become a disruptive voice, speaking about product durability at events, on TV, podcasts and BBC radio. Tara’s early career in marketing and advertising meant she could unpack the psychology of consumerism, and she has written a very engaging and insightful book on mindful consumption, A Life Less Throwaway, published by Harper Collins. We touch on aspects of what’s in the book, which has some great tips to help us spot the various kinds of marketing tactics before we get sucked into the ‘buy it now’ decision.

Yann Toutant is the founder of Black Winch, which helps businesses understand the opportunities, practicalities and benefits of shifting to ‘as a service’ models, and supports them in making it happen. Yann has been implementing subscription-based models for hardware in the ICT industry for 25 years, including over a decade as CEO of Econocom’s Dutch operations. Today with his own company, Black Winch, Yann Toutant helps CEOs and their teams to focus on the user experience by incorporating all components of an As-A-Service offer into a single in-house comprehensive, scalable subscription model. Yann sees offering a doorway to circular economy as one of the main drivers, making it possible to centralise ownership and to industrialise circularity at scale. We discuss why ‘as a service’ is becoming more popular, for business customers as well as for people in general, and then Yann talks about some of the benefits for service-based businesses, and how Black Winch helps its clients take the first, easy steps to ignite that journey. Yann explains how, for some products, ‘as a service’ is likely to exist alongside traditional ownership models, and what he sees as the motivators for that.

Ruth Taylor of the Common Cause Foundation guides us through the field of social psychology, to explore how our personal values drive behaviour, and what that means for sustainability and the circular economy. I recently completed ‘Values 101’, a short course run by the Common Cause Foundation. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about our behaviour and what motivates our choices, actions and interactions. The course tutors were Ruth and her colleague Tom Crompton, and today, I’m talking to Ruth about some of my main takeaways from the course. The Common Cause Foundation works at the intersection of culture change and human values, and is driven by the belief that it is possible to design societies that magnify and strengthen the cooperative and caring parts of human nature. By doing that together, we can build ways of living that are equitable and just, and lie within our planetary boundaries. The Common Cause Foundation sees Values playing a pivotal role in shaping our cultures and systems. The dominant global culture is out of balance, prioritising extrinsic values such as wealth, power and social status, in a way that has led us to the brink of destruction; with crises of poverty, inequality and climate change. Common Cause Foundation’s work shows that balance can be restored by elevating intrinsic values instead – values like community, creativity and unity with nature. Ruth Taylor has worked in the field of social and environmental change for close to 15 years. She is driven by the question of how more people can be encouraged to think, feel and act differently when it comes to the multiple and interconnected challenges we are experiencing globally. Ruth explains what values mean, and how they impact our daily lives, and we talk about the Perception Gap – the mistaken beliefs we have about other people’s values, and why that matters. We also talk about why we might not always act in line with our values, and how we can overcome that. We explore how engaging certain values could influence more sustainable and circular behaviours, and how it’s relatively easy for people to become interested in topics and actions that have similar underlying principles - for example, being passionate about women’s rights makes it more likely that you’ll be interested in supporting other movements for equality and fairness, both for humans and other-than humans. We find out how values are like muscles, and can be strengthened, and we discover why we misunderstand other people’s values, and how that’s holding back our shift to a circular and regenerative world.

Professor Walter R Stahel, widely acknowledged as a circular economy pioneer, talks about progress, barriers and missed opportunities. Walter is the founder and director of the Product-Life Institute in Switzerland, founded in 1982 and now Europe’s oldest sustainability-based consultancy and think tank. These days, his is a keynote speaker and author on sustainability and circular economy and says he has always been interested in what he does not know. With over 500 publications since 1975, he holds a number of visiting professor and lecturing roles, and a long list of awards and advisory roles, including being a Full Member of the Club of Rome. Walter sees the circular economy as a ‘changer of the globalised industrial game’, creating societal resilience and providing protection against disruptive events. Walter created the idea of the performance economy, as a way of extending the concepts of the circular economy, and says that many of the opportunities are either untapped, or criticised by those who benefit from the Rentier Economy. (If you want to know more about the problems of the rentier economy, have a listen back to ep 119 with Ken Webster.) We talk about the business case for the circular economy, and Walter highlights some of the aspects that are often missed, especially for the future value of materials. We discuss the opportunities offered by platforms, digital twins and passports for products and materials, and why we need better ways to assess the remaining life of expensive products and components. We discuss the need to shift from a mindset of owning to using, and the need to change how we frame things for customers and businesses. Walter describes how we might rethink designs to minimise risks and liabilities, and how caring for our things opens up lots of interesting career opportunities, especially for young people.