Hate waste? Love Olio, your local sharing app on a mission to solve the climate crisis one share at a time.
Olio is a sharing app for local communities, making it easy to give away the things you don’t need to someone else who would value them. When we first started out, we fought food waste. Today, we fight any thing going to waste. From food to furniture and clothing to books, Olio is the feel-good way to declutter.
Olio also works with businesses to redistribute their unsold or unserved food. We pair trained volunteers with local shops, cafes and offices who pick up whatever food is left at the end of each day. They then add it to the app for people living nearby to request and collect. That way, we get spare food on tables, rather than it going in the bin.
The problem of global overconsumption is, to state the obvious, a big one. It can be hard as an individual to feel you can make a difference. But contrary to the popular narrative, what we do as individuals does count. It was billions of small actions that caused the climate crisis. So by the same logic, billions of small actions can help to get us out of it.
When most people think about playing their part in helping the environment, they think of recycling… but we absolutely cannot recycle our way out of this mess. We need a brand new model of consumption — one where when we want to consume, the first thing we do is utilise the resources that already exist in our local communities. In other words: sharing instead of shopping needs to become our default model of consumption to reduce the number of ‘new’ items coming in to replace perfectly good ones that are simply being discarded.
Here at Olio, we believe that small actions can lead to big change. Collectively – one rescued printer, carrot or bottle of lotion at a time – we can build a more sustainable future where our resources are shared, not thrown away.
We have a responsibility to practise what we preach, too, which is why we take the steps to ensure Olio is run as sustainably as possible. We are currently carbon negative (which means we reduce the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere), and we were recently awarded a B Corp certification for maintaining a high standard of social and environmental performance.
By empowering local communities with a free, accessible, and effective solution to reduce waste, we are confident that we will be able to have a lasting, meaningful impact on the world: one share at a time.