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 anything 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.

Last Updated: 10/30/25