University of Liverpool embraces reuse with Warp It

Warp It are pleased to welcome Sustainable Development Project Officer Julie McPhee from Stirling Council in Scotland to talk about:

• Signing up to Warp It after meeting at a conference
• Making large donations to charities
• Collaboarating with the building clearance team
• The liberating feeling of having items claimed

Hi Julie, thanks for giving up your time to speak with us for the benefit of our readers. Why did you commission Warp It? What led to the decision?

We were looking for a solution for our unwanted furniture and surplus assets. One of our elected members had been looking out of the window and saw a bookcase sitting in the rain and decided to pursue a change. In the past, everything we did with reuse was ad hoc, so there might have been a frantic phone call to the Salvation Army to see if they wanted something. Invariably, things were no use to them, no use to us, and had be disposed of, so things would either go off to the tip, or if they were fortunate, they’d be recycled. Shortly after this, I was at a conference and I heard you (Daniel O’Connor) talking about Warp It. It sounded like the solution we needed, and easy to set up, so that’s how it all kicked off.

It’s great that you saw the problem, sought a solution and fate brought us together! So at this point, we’ve spent some time getting you set up, so can you tell us how your building clearances have improved?

So far we’ve had two main buildings be decommissioned and put on the market for new tenants. They’re not going to be used by the council anymore. So, we have had a lot of surplus furniture that ordinarily we wouldn’t have been able to find a home for and would have been hard to get rid of, but using Warp It has been a great outlet and hasn’t caused us any hassle. The furniture’s there, we list it on the online reuse portal and somebody comes to pick it up. In the past, it would have been a logistical nightmare trying to get an item to people. Now, all the systems are in place to make things run smoothly.

Fantastic to hear! What’s even better is that you’ve only been on the system a short time, but you’re already in the top 10 for donating assets to charity!

We’ve actually just used this as a good news story. Our environment committee were slightly critical that we weren’t publicising our good work well enough. The fact that we made it into the top 10 was ripe for a good news story, so we turned it into different formats and it’s on the ticker tape on our website, as well as in a council-wide email saying ‘Congratulations, we’re in the top 10!’. We’ve added it to the member’s bulletin for next week, so they’ll find the news in their pigeon holes too. We are learning as we go along, and yesterday’s email blast lead me to have 14 new member requests this morning!

If you’ve landed on this page it means one of two things...

A) You’re thinking about rolling out a reuse project, or

Sally Attwood and Amanda Davies from Public Health Wales kindly volunteered to share their experiences for this interview. 

In this article we will be asking Sally and Amanda about a huge relocation project they’ve managed recently, where they maximised the reuse and refurbishment of office furniture, and how they’ve managed to:

Ready to introduce a reuse programme, or improve on the existing system?

Read ahead and find out the best practice for using a meeting plan to get more buy ins and increase support from your stakeholders.

Warp It’s vision since day one has always been to normalise the reuse of surplus assets across organisational estates, such as universities, councils and hospitals.

Despite the proven benefits of a reuse system in these organisations, we still see many opting to throw their surplus assets in skips and dumpsters on a daily basis.

Eventually this will stop.