Our Partners

Circular Kitchens is a Community Interest Company on a mission to build a circular and regenerative hospitality sector. They work with restaurants, cafés, pubs, and food businesses to transform their operations across four core principles: becoming plastic-free, ecological, local, and zero waste.

Their membership model supports food businesses to make meaningful, practical changes — from eliminating single-use plastics and switching to responsibly sourced ingredients, to minimising food waste and prioritising the nearest viable supplier. Circular Kitchens also invites households to join their growing community, with plans to help home kitchens adopt the same principles.

The alignment with Plastic Free Whitstable is clear. Businesses in our directory who carry the Circular Kitchens tag have committed to their framework — a standard that goes hand in hand with the plastic-free values at the heart of our own community.

The Big Plastic Count is the UK's largest people-powered investigation into household plastic waste, run by Everyday Plastic and supported by the National Lottery Community Fund. Each year, households, schools, community groups, and workplaces across the UK count every piece of plastic they throw away over the course of a single week — turning individual action into national data.

The results are striking. The 2026 count found that UK households discard an estimated 82 billion pieces of plastic packaging every year. More than half of it is incinerated, just 16% is recycled, and a further 16% is shipped abroad — frequently to countries with far fewer resources to handle it. Food and drink packaging accounts for 82% of all household plastic waste, and over 13 billion pieces of fruit and vegetable packaging are thrown away annually, much of it flexible plastic that cannot be recycled at scale.

The campaign makes the case that this is a systemic problem, not an individual one — and calls on government to legislate, not simply encourage. Their current asks include removing plastic packaging from uncut fruit and vegetables by 2030, halting the construction of new waste incinerators, and ending the export of plastic waste to other countries.

Whitstable residents can take part each March. Joining the count takes just one week and your data directly contributes to the national picture that shapes policy — a small action with a genuinely large reach.