University of Liverpool embraces reuse with Warp It

Let’s give the floor to Micaela Basford, Corporate Sustainability Officer at Bath and North East Somerset Council, who has kindly joined us to talk about ethical and sustainable building clearances.

Warp It are pleased to welcome the wonderful Ashley Scotland, founder of Thriving Survivors, a charity for the brave survivors of trauma.

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!

Horsham District Council’s Commissioning and Performance and Sustainability teams won the Sustainability/Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative of the Year Award at the National Government Opportunities (GO) Excellence in Public Procurement Awards 2016/17. 

The team won for their innovative commissioning approach to the sustainable disposal of surplus office equipment when the council moved from its old premises to a new shared office space with West Sussex County Council in 2015.

Using Warp It, the commissioning project succeeded in disposing of a large amount of unwanted office contents without it having to go to landfill, greatly minimising the cost of disposal of the items.

Warp It opens the floor for Helen Peacock from Horsham District Council, who has been generous with her time in giving us some fantastic and in-depth answers to our questions. In this article you can expect to find important advice for:

You’re going to love this! We’ve invited Adam Connell from James Cook University in Australia to show us how Warp It is working on their campus, on the other side of the world!

Let’s give a big hand to Andy Hay from NHS Tayside, who has joined us to talk about exactly why it’s simple math for procurement professionals to lead on reuse of furniture, equipment and supplies in institutions.

We talk:

• Sustainable healthcare.
• Why procurement should take an active part in encouraging reuse in an organisation.
• How they have made procurement savings of over £210K on a £10K investment.

We’re really pleased to share this conversation with you, as well as some of the great things that Andy has told us in the past about reuse at NHS Tayside.

Warp It proudly welcomes Ian Sommerville from NHS Humberside to discuss how a reuse operation can function from the perspective of a porter. This short and sweet interview will give you a quick insight into:

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:

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.