Encouraging Londoners to
embrace circular lifestyles

Behaviour change – whether in business, among policy makers, or across civil society – powers the zero waste economy.

Technology and new forms of energy can solve a huge chunk of the climate challenge. But there are still dangerous carbon emissions which can only be addressed through wholesale shifts in behaviour. There are many effective approaches we can take individually, and as families and communities, to meaningfully slow down consumption.

Helping Londoners go zero waste

In 2024, we saw significant growth in people’s interest in repair as Repair Week almost doubled in size for the fourth year in a row. Manchester took part for the second time, with more planning time and a real intent to scale up activities, after dipping their toe in the water in 2023.

During the 2023-24 year Eat like a Londoner, run on behalf of 27 London boroughs and the One World Living theme of London Councils’ climate programme, went live. We ran three advertising bursts with messaging encouraging Londoners to waste less food and eat more plants to help save money and eat more healthily.

Our Love Not Landfill campaign team ran more activations during the 2023-24 year than ever before. We attracted interest from a wide range of partners and got young Londoners excited about buying second-hand. We also ran our third and final year of London Recycles’ ‘Be that person’ campaign, sharing a full toolkit of free-to-use campaign assets with boroughs and other partners across London.

We saw evidence that all of our campaigns have good levels of recall across the city, with those who saw them telling us they’re recycling more and wasting less.

The London Councils’ climate survey, run in September 2023, showed that over 40% of respondents said ReLondon’s campaigns had prompted them to adopt more circular practices (such as repair, reuse, sharing and recycling). They also said we’d helped build their understanding about how they can personally help with the climate crisis.