City to Sea

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City to Sea is an environmental not-for-profit, campaigning to stop plastic pollution at source. City to Sea began in Natalie Fee´s head in 2014, as she wondered what would happen if she gathered a collaboration of practitioners, scientists, local organisations, marine biologists and campaigners in a pub to tackle plastic pollution. Equally fed up and generally devastated by the amount of plastic litter flowing from Bristol into the Severn Estuary, Michelle and Livvy joined Natalie to see how we could phase out single-use plastics and create replicable models that could be shared with other coastal and river-based cities. In 2020 we´re a team of 25, delivering award-winning campaigns to prevent plastic pollution at source.

Our award-winning campaigns are tackling the single-use plastic items found most commonly on our beaches and in our rivers and oceans by providing practical solutions and championing reuse over single-use.
We´re working with communities, corporates and retailers to inspire and empower everyone to connect their actions to our oceans.
We believe collective action is key to lasting behaviour change and encourage everyone to rethink, refuse, reduce and reuse across all our campaigns.

Our mission is to prevent plastic pollution at source by awakening active hope, championing practical solutions and inspiring collective action.

Our approach:
Rethink, refuse, reduce, reuse
• We focus on stopping plastic at source by reducing demand, so our oceans and beaches won’t need to be cleaned in the future.
• We positively engage and influence retailers, businesses and government. We work with them to create systemic change, reducing their use of plastics and making reusables more accessible.
• We believe collective action is key to lasting behaviour change and encourage everyone to rethink, refuse, reduce and reuse across all our campaigns.
• We pride ourselves on our positive and playful approach, ensuring our campaigns are inclusive.

Our campaigns and projects:
• We persuaded all major supermarkets and stores to #SwitchTheStick stopping over 478 tonnes of single-use, plastic-stemmed cotton buds being produced each year!
• Our Refill campaign has grown from a pilot scheme in Bristol in 2015, to an international revolution, with over 30,000 Refill Stations across the UK and over 270,000 app downloads. The campaign has prevented 100 million plastic bottles from entering our waste stream and is now set to expand to become the go-to for avoiding all single-use plastic packaging.
• In 2019 ´National Refill Day`, our annual public awareness campaign reached over 70 million people and was trending on social media all day. The campaign received over 100+ pieces of media coverage and had support from hundreds of brands and influencers.
• Almost a quarter of a million people signed our petition calling for a visible tax on single-use items like coffee cups, at point of sale.
• In 2019, our #PlasticFreePeriods campaign reached more than 4 million people, successfully lobbied Department for Education to offer plastic free period products in schools, and prevented more than half a million pieces of plastic! We also won two awards for Turning Tides, our film to raise awareness of the hidden plastic in period products.
• Our RethinkPeriods education programme launched in 2019, to offer schools an unbiased education program to educate about the menstrual cycle, reduce pollution from period products and tackle period taboos and poverty. By the end of 2020 we will have reached over 30,000 young people – empowering them to make informed decision on the products they use and how they dispose of them.


Chloe O´Keeffe is the Partnerships Co-Ordinator at City to Sea.

For other net participants we can offer an expert guidance through trained staff, give an expert opinion, procure expert information and establish new contacts in the field of our work.