Rethinkin­g Waste Through Collabora­tion

As we mark World Recycling Day 2026, we are looking at how that same pioneering, optimistic, and collaborative energy can help us rethink our relationship with the materials we use on campus every day. While we are proud to consistently hit above our 65% recycling rate target, our goal goes beyond that. We aim to focus on reusing waste as much as possible – and ideally avoiding it altogether.

As part of this mission, we’ve been collaborating with The Loop – East London’s first circular economy hub – which is a collaborative workspace for circular businesses created by Hackney Wick & Fish Island Community Development Trust. Together, we are exploring how to implement circularity within the built environment and to benefit the wider community.

The collaboration is guided by several ongoing, practical conversations: How can we join forces to make Here East a more circular campus? What can we do in the future to spearhead further initiatives in the wider Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park area? How can we share our experiences so far and use them to empower others to do the same?

Here East x The Loop

A key catalyst for our work together was the inaugural Sustainability Forum held last May. Serving as a vital awareness-raising platform, this welcomed local businesses from The Loop to our campus to showcase their work to Here East tenants through stalls and talks. Our aim with this forum was to increase visibility for organisations in our local circular economy, connect our tenants directly into this network, and build the trust needed to begin exploring opportunities to collaborate together. For example, this led to our tenant Studio Wayne McGregor – a creative arts space – donating clothing and textiles to FibreLab, a textile recycling start-up that is part of The Loop.

Here East has also teamed up with several of The Loop businesses to launch pioneering trials to demonstrate the potential of circular thinking in a real-world setting.

With Fibre Lab we hosted two workshops for our community to transform leftover textiles from a campus clothes swap into patchwork tote bags and laptop cases. Likewise, Are You Mad – a conscious creative unit that transforms waste into products, education, and experiences – transformed 140kg of plastic generated by our tenants into a flowering green wall and custom planters on our campus. And with the help of Compost Collective – a community organisation on a mission to revolutionise waste management – we have installed a three-tier composting system on our Press Centre roof (made using wooden pallets donated by our tenants) as well as a wormery and 10 bokashi buckets (indoor, fermentation-based composting systems) which can process over 200kg of food waste per month.

“Here East's collaboration with The Loop has helped us to achieve so much more than simply recycling – together, we have been able to inspire and educate our tenants who were integral to the outcomes of our initiatives. By opening up our campus as a testbed for sustainable projects – whether through rooftop composting or textile upcycling – these collaborations have embodied Here East's ethos of creating at scale: providing space to for experiments today that can help us understand how to implement sustainable change at a much larger scale tomorrow,” explains Isaac Vale, ESG Coordinator at Here East.

Here East was designed to be a sandbox for what’s next – a place where innovations are trialled, bold ideas are born, and where we view failure as a vital catalyst for bigger thinking. By collaborating with the pioneering organisations at The Loop, we are applying that same entrepreneurial mindset to our environmental challenges.

We aren't looking for overnight fixes; we are focused on the continual improvement of our campus sustainability, using our experiences here to empower others across the wider Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and beyond.

Thank you to all the businesses we have collaborated with at The Loop – we look forward to working together again in the future!