University of Liverpool embraces reuse with Warp It

All the reasons why reuse systems are low-hanging fruit for Smart cities

‘Smart City’ is a new buzzword in the world of sustainability, environment and urban planning, but why wouldn’t it be? It’s great to see nature and technology influence design in a way that they focus on working together for a better future. This whole sector is seeing massive growth and progression, with sub-sectors seeing huge opportunities to introduce new ideas and test out theories.

Warp It are pleased to welcome Andrew Mouat from Glasgow City Council to dive deeper into GAS, the Glasgow Asset Share Group. This is not our first article on this subject, in fact, you can see more material on this innovative enterprise here. In this article we see some new perspectives, in particular:

Low time input but big impact

I want to maximise your impact with ideas that are easy to produce but have a big impact. These activities are force multipliers for your reuse program! Just pick one to do every week or month and you will be chipping away at culture change without much effort.

One way to learn is to make mistakes. Another way to learn is to listen to a teacher. Another way to learn is to talk to people who have done it before.

By talking to others and sharing experiences we learn quicker. What works, what doesnt work. 

When Glenn Feagley, the Lion Surplus Manager at Penn State University said:

“At Penn State University, the Surplus Department can generate up to $2 to $3 million a year and I know a few more universities are doing similar.”

we knew we had to find out more.

America always seems to think big! We wanted to find out more about the surplus property sector and reuse within American Universities to see if there were any good ideas we could present back to our customers. We spoke to surplus and sustainability managers all over USA and produced this report- Read about it here. 

Thankyou to all the dedicated managers who helped us with this study.

For convenience we thought we would put all of the US Case studies in one place on line so here they are. 

When Glenn Feagley, the Lion Surplus Manager at Penn State University said:

“At Penn State University, the Surplus Department can generate up to $2 to $3 million a year and I know a few more universities are doing similar.”

we knew we had to find out more.

We are always looking for ways to improve how we deliver the Warp It service to all of our customers. Therefore we felt that we could learn from and how the US sector maximises resource and asset value. We spoke to a whole host of surplus managers to get the lowdown and have presented our findings in the report below. 

This report will be of use to 

• Surplus managers
• Procurement managers
• Sustainability managers
• Waste managers
• Service design managers
• Finance Directors
• Estates and Facilities Directors

When it comes to culture change: One of the most persuasive sources of information that staff need to hear to make that change is word of mouth influence from other staff.

Just like when you’re shopping online and want to browse through the customer reviews, staff want to see what kinds of experiences other people have had with your proposed culture change project.

I was speaking to Alex Fowler from Humberside NHS recently and he said that there were departments within his organisation who were now using 100% reused furniture.

This got me thinking about making it easy for Alex to do a case study in these departments. So see below for our downloadable template.

In this case we are talking about identifying a department who are doing really well on your furniture and equipment reuse program, however it can apply to any culture change project.

In this blog post we explain a couple of benefits of using case study and give you access to a template  to go about creating a case study in order to increase participation in your online reuse portal.

We've recently produced a report looking at the reuse and surplus asset sector in universities, some of which are based in the USA. One of the common things we discovered is that most of the projects, if not all of them, have some sort or student intern, student helpers, or student employees.

In the US it is standard practice to engage interns to deliver a meaningful proportion of the surplus assets reuse program- we found that out in a recent study we conducted.  Download here.

Each month we scour the web and talk to our friends for tips, tricks and tools to help you tackle different challenges and become better!

This month we share some tips on breaking the ice – after all no-one should be stuck for words when meeting new people!

We’ve also found some cool remedies that will help you ward off the dreaded cold and flu symptoms this winter and stay positive and healthy.