Photos courtesy of Gareth Slade Photography 

Refill is an award-winning campaign to prevent plastic pollution at source by making it easier to reuse and refill your bottle instead of buying a new one. 

The campaign works by connecting people looking for water with thousands of Refill stations across the UK via a location-based app. Anyone can download the free app and find Refill Stations where they can refill for free on the go.

Participating cafes, bars, restaurants, banks, galleries, museums and other businesses simply sign up to the app and put a sticker in their window – alerting passers-by that they’re welcome to come on in and fill up their bottle.

With almost 18,000 Refill Stations and over 90,000 app downloads, we’ve proved that Refill has the power to create a tipping point and normalise carrying a reusable bottle and reducing plastic pollution at source. If all our Refill stations are used just once a day, we're stopping more than 5 million plastic bottles at source in a year.

City to Sea, a not-for-profit organisation headed by entrepreneur Natalie Fee, launched the award-winning Refill Scheme in 2015. She says: “We’ve seen a huge appetite for our Refill campaign across theUK, from individuals wanting to make a difference in their community to national chains keen to offer free refills to their customers. Our Refill app puts the power to stop plastic pollution in people’s hands – and now thanks to the water industry we'll be able to help everyone, from local communities to airports, to provide free refills on the go.”

Refill Eastbourne is on an exciting mission to make refilling your water bottle as easy, convenient and cheap as possible, by introducing Refill Stations on every street. This scheme encourages participating cafes,bars, restaurants, banks, galleries, museums and other businesses to sign up to the free Refill app and put a sticker in their window alerting passers-by to the fact that you’re welcome to fill up your bottle for free.

The average adult buys more than 3 plastic water bottles every week - a startling 175

bottles every year per person. In total, some 7.7 billion plastic bottles are bought across the

UK each year, resulting in substantial amounts of single-use plastic waste ending up in our oceans.

Local Co-ordinator ~ Oliver Sterno ~ from Plastic Free Eastbourne, with Gareth Slade who runs our Facebook Refill Eastbourne page, explains why both businesses and their customers should get involved:

“Plastic Free Eastbourne are rightly proud of the area’s stunning landscape, countryside and beaches. Plastics, including single-use plastic bottles, are now the most frequently found type of litter on UK beaches and you don’t have to look far to find them littering our towns and green spaces too.”

Oliver added, “Refill Eastbourne gives us all the opportunity to help make this type of

litter a thing of the past at the same time as saving money. It’s good business sense as well,

as customers view businesses that provide free water refills more favourably and are more

likely to return to them to make future purchases.

Refill Eastbourne builds on the success of Refill around theUK, which now boasts a network of

almost 18,000 Refill Stations. Mala Nathan, Refill Regional Coordinator, says “We’re so excited thatEastbourne has joined the Refill movement and has been making a real difference by reducing reliance on single-use plastics. Every time we refill a re-usable bottle we save our own money and the planet’s resources, and all those individual refills add up to a huge impact. The cost of one plastic bottle of water is equivalent to 500 litres of tap water. It’s great to see so many local businesses are beginning to support Refill Eastbourne by signing up to provide free refills.”