At the start of March, the CircleUp consortium travelled from across Europe to meet together in Oxford and discuss progress in the project. The plan was to spend two days together, allowing time for a wide range of presentations and workshops. Fortunately, before we got too distracted with work, we made some time to enjoy a historic tour of Oxford and dinner in one of the city’s oldest pubs, The Chequers.

To kick-off the meeting, our coordinator Andra Blumberga gave a speech about the film Flow, who’s small team of Latvian animators had recently won an Oscar. The hope? That our small team in CircleUp could achieve similar greatness!

The first session focused on storytelling. Stories are an important part of the CircleUp vision – they’re even mentioned in our project title “100 Households, 100 Circular Stories: Inspiring Sustainable Living in Europe”. We shared examples of our own circular behaviours and discussed, “what makes a story inspiring?” and “when is a story worth sharing?”. The hope is that stories will be a key way that we engage with households, and this workshop helped us to test how that might work.

We were then very lucky to be joined by representatives from Community Action Groups Oxfordshire and Sustainable Wantage, two local organisations who help to coordinate community circular economy activities including repair cafes, community fridges, and library of things. It was really inspiring to see successful examples of household engagement with the circular economy (as well as hear about the challenges in getting there) and we’re hoping to work with them closely to engage households in the UK pilot.

To finish the first day, we started to design individual and group challenges to encourage households to adopt behaviours around our four target material streams: food, plastic and paper packaging, electronics, and textiles. The challenges are being carefully balanced across all stages of our behaviour change model - adapted from the stage model of self-regulated behavioural change (SSBC) created by Bamberg (2013).

On the second day, we got our first chance as a consortium to see the smart bin prototype in-person. The smart bins will be given to the households we work with to help quantify some of the changes in their different waste streams. It was great to finally be able to hold and touch what had just been an idea.

We spent the rest of the day discussing the timeline between now and the start of our work with households. Our test phase begins in November 2025 which might sound like a long way off but we have a lot to get finished before then!

Overall, it was a brilliant meeting – it’s always so productive when we get the chance to meet together face-to-face. Thanks to Oxfordshire County Council and Earthwatch Europe for hosting. We managed to achieve a lot in just two days but there’s plenty more we need to do. We’re equally excited and nervous for the rest of 2025 and all we plan to achieve.

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