Words by Smiley Team
“I always say it was billions of small actions that got us into the climate crisis. So by that same logic, billions of small actions can help get us out of it.”
This is the view of Tessa Clarke, the co-founder and CEO of the free sharing app, OLIO, which allows individuals and businesses anywhere to share surplus food as well as household items.
Tessa along with co-founder and COO Saasha Celestial-One, have good reasons to be optimistic. Since its launch in 2015, OLIO has cut emissions equivalent to that of 100 million cars and saved 5 billion litres of water from excess production and waste.
Recalling the app’s early days, Tessa says: “We knew from the off how big a problem food waste was. Globally, a third of all the food we produce each year gets thrown away. If food waste was a country it would be the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the USA and China. So from the very beginning, we knew that we had to solve this problem at scale as quickly as possible.”
[Read more positive news about initiatives working drive climate action]
Five years after OLIO’s creation, the number of app users suddenly rocketed during the pandemic. “Under lockdown, people wanted to connect with their local communities and lead more sustainable lives while the wildfires and flooding started to feel a lot closer to home,” she explains.
Today the app is available anywhere in the world and has successfully seen its innovative sharing system put to use in over 61 countries. Recently they’ve also added an additional ‘borrow’ section to the app, where neighbours can lend and borrow household objects such as games, tools, kitchen appliances and more.
[Discover other inspiring stories about people changing our world for the better]
Tessa is still highly conscious of the app’s remaining potential to drive even more significant changes to help protect life on Earth.
“Whilst we’ve made incredible progress, it's a long way from where we need to be,” she says. “We want one billion people to be using OLIO by 2030 because we need to tackle waste more ambitiously if we are to have any chance of keeping global warming to 1.5℃ above preindustrial levels.”
Discover more and download OLIO here.
