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

Circular Economy Podcast

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.