That’s a wrap on World Refill Day 2024!
How We Stepped Up for Reuse on World Refill Day
This year, World Refill Day fell on a Sunday that was not only Father’s Day here in the UK, but England’s first match in the Euros. This meant we could extend our annual global awareness day activity and enjoy a jam-packed week of events and action for refill and reuse.
World Refill Day is a global day of action designed to accelerate the transition away from single-use plastic and towards refill and reuse. Together with our community and partners we’ve built an unstoppable global movement of everyday activists, NGOs and sustainable businesses on a mission to make plastic pollution a thing of the past.
This year, our World Refill Day activity focused on campaigning for legislative change around refill and reuse. Our research shows that people want to reduce single-use packaging, but they can’t find reusable alternatives where they shop. We now need governments around the world to legislate mandatory standards for reuse to support industry to scale-up and meet this growing demand.
Our Message in a Bottle
That’s why, this World Refill Day, we launched our call for international policy change to accelerate the transition from single-use to reuse. We wrote an open letter to political party leaders ahead of the general election, calling for a commitment to refill and reuse and asking them to set legally-binding, time-bound targets to accelerate the transition to reuse in the UK and to support a robust Global Plastics Treaty.
Over 40 NGOs, businesses and celebrities supported and signed our open letter, which became our ‘message in a bottle’ – sending, as Sting famously sung, an SOS to the world.
Walking the Walk
A few days before World Refill Day, the City to Sea team were joined in central London by partners and collaborators to walk from Vauxhall to Southwark, delivering a printed copy of the open letter – inside one of the new Refill X Ocean Bottle bottles – to the headquarters of The Liberal Democrats, The Conservatives and The Labour Party.
A Global Movement
Our message in a bottle travelled much further than Central London, with celebrities around the world supporting the open letter – from LA to Kenya, Germany to Indonesia!
25 celebrities including Rob Rinder, Deborah Meaden, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Aesha Scott, and Dee Caffari pledged support for our call and shared photos on social media of themselves with their Refill X Ocean Bottle.
Vote to stop plastic pollution
In the run up to World Refill Day, we ask our community of supporters and friends to take action by writing to their local candidates asking them to pledge their support for reuse. With the general election just a few days away, we encourage anyone who hasn’t already done so to write to their local candidate here.
Remember to vote on 4th July. Take a look at what each of the manifestos promise on plastic and how they measure up to City to Sea’s Reuse Manifesto.
And once the new government is in place, we’ll be ramping up the pressure and advocating for our Reuse Manifesto, reinforcing our call for binding reuse targets. We’ve got a Parliamentary Reception planned in the Autumn and we want to see commitment from policy makers to accelerate the transition from single-use to reuse. Watch this space!
Thanks to all of YOU for being part of another fantastic World Refill Day and for stepping up for reuse with us!
Thanks to our partners and friends Ocean Bottle, Reposit, Fill, Abel & Cole and Dr. Bronner’s for joining us on our London walk and to official World Refill Day partners Ocean Bottle, Ecover and Culligan UK for helping us to keep powering the Refill movement!
Can you chip in to help us make a bigger splash?
We couldn’t run campaigns like World Refill Day without the support and generosity of our donators and sponsors.
Will you donate £25 to our World Refill Day campaign to help us make reuse second nature to stop plastic pollution?