Break free from overconsumption and reuse all year round

We caught up with London Metropolitan University’s Pamela Rodrigues, a graduate intern working in the sustainability and environmental teams within the university. Pamela plans to go on to study her Master’s degree and work in Environmental Auditing, but right now she’s here to talk to us about her experience of working with Warp It within the university.

At the end of this article we also give you access to a free intern job description for your reuse program.

We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Clare Topping, Energy and Sustainability Manager at Northampton General Hospital. Also known as a Green Ninja, Clare’s sheer passion for waste and all things sustainable really shines through and is thoroughly infectious!

This blog post is about how a large organisation is using Warp It to reuse and cascade their IT assets throughout the organisaition , as well as donating externally- to maximise the value of the assets.

Warp It have built relationships with so many of our wonderful customers, none less so than Alan Peddie, who manages the Warp It portal at the University of Edinburgh. We invited Alan to speak frankly about his experience of using Warp It and how it has:

• Redistrinbuting IT assets internally
• Facilitated donation of assets to the charity sector

• Benefited the IT department

• Encouraged refurbishment as well as reuse

• Helped over 500 computers get refurbished instead of recycled externally

• Given Alan a very unique superhero-style nickname!

Warp It are really excited to welcome Neil Duncan, the Waste Management Officer at NHS Grampian in Scotland. Neil has been leading a really great project, and he’s also the man in charge of Warp It on the estate, so we called him up to discuss the following things:

Warp It welcome Selina Woolcott from the University of Glasgow as she talks about the Glasgow Asset Share Group.

We opened up the floor to Selina and let her speak freely about her experience of using Warp It. It’s really interesting what she had to say. You can consider this an opinion piece from an expert Warp It member!

I went to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) conference last year in Baltimore. The 4 days I spent there were very rewarding. I met literally 100s of sustainability people and attended an eye watering spectrum of sessions and workshops.

I had the fortune to attend a session by PeopleTowels.

PeopleTowels is a 100% certified Women Owned Business and offer an alternative to paper towels. Which piqued my interest as we all know reuse is the most effective use of materials. 

PeopleTowels offer a non disposable towel which is used to dry your hands after visiting the bathroom. This solves the whole "What's better for the environment disposable paper towels versus hand dryers" debate forever!

I thought this was very interesting as this is not common place in the West...but it should be! In this article we interview some of the main protagonists for switching from disposable towels to PeopleTowels!

We are pleased to be back with another fantastic interview, this time with Tytus Murphy, Sustainability Project Officer at King’s College London. Tytus’ role is part of the Estates & Facilities team, who have been using Warp It since April 2016. One reason we have been so keen to talk to Tytus is that King’s College London have been recording some fantastic reuse statistics.

In this short article we catch up with Jude Hughes the Environment and Energy Manager from the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control  (NIBSC) and review their Warp It case study 2 years on. Check out the original here.

NIBSC are more than 2 years into their reuse project and they were hugely successful at the start, so we want to know what has happened since then, what have the issues been, what challenges were faced and how did they overcome any hurdles.

Are you decommissioning a school building and thinking "how do i clear a school?" of surplus assets? Or "How do I redistribute surplus assets?" 

Edinburgh City Council achieved cost avoidance of £300K redistributing the surplus assets from just one school using Warp It. When we found out about this amazing feat we had to find out how they did it. We spoke to the project lead, Mollie Kerr.

The highlights of the project is as follows

• Strong leadership from the procurement department
• Collaboration with different Service Areas
• Purchasing controlled by procurement department
• The reuse of surplus assets is prioritized over recycling- (A no brainer right? You would think so but most building clearences pass their surplus for recycling- this is bad- the value in a chair is providing the function of sitting! Not scrap value for metal. )