University of Liverpool embraces reuse with Warp It

We’ve seen our partners do amazing things, such as win national awards, save tens of thousands of pounds worth of equipment from going to landfill, and put together incredible reuse networks that encourage people to share.

In this case study, we are going to look at one network that has done all of these things, and more. We are talking about The Sunderland Partnership.

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:

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:

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. )