Giving our pre-loved furniture a new home

To mark Green Week, we spoke with Vicky Hill – Interior Design, Furniture and Equipment (IDF&E) Manager in Estates – to find out about the award-winning work her team is doing to rehome pre-loved furniture at Warwick.

Transcript

The University produces an awful lot of redundant furniture, this redundant furniture needs to have a second, third, fourth life sometimes. The stuff that comes out is perfectly reusable in different spaces but there was no formal process for how we tracked that, how we monitored it, how we linked into projects. So, basically we match needs to wants.

So, since June last year we've now just ticked over 1500 items of furniture reused on campus and these are items of furniture that are no longer wanted or needed. So departments like the furniture team know they they come in they look at what they've got, pick out the good stuff, sometimes tighten screws, give it a clean and then we find new homes for it across campus. Another big part of what we've done is also look at that stuff that isn't wanted on campus and find excellent local partners in our community and across our region we can give those valuable items of furniture to, to help them and to support them in doing all the wonderful work they do across the region.

Some of the success stories that we've had was a large volume of furniture came available which we picked up and wanted to redistribute across the whole of the campus and just find the little pockets of spaces for it that we can jazz up spaces and we're currently in the process of doing that and it's working really nicely.

https://warwick.ac.uk/insite/news/intnews2/furniturereusescheme/

Infographic explaining info from blog post

New homes for used items

The Furniture Reuse scheme was set up by the University’s Estates team, who wanted a more sustainable way of providing furniture to teams across campus. Rather than purchasing brand-new items each time they’re requested – and unknowingly wasting existing furniture that needs a new home – the team now works to provide pre-loved pieces of equipment to staff wherever possible.

How it works

Staff who want to make use of the Furniture Reuse scheme can log a request via the Estates ServiceDesk – the team will triage the request and work out which next steps to take. If minor repairs are needed, these will be carried out. The furniture will then be advertised on the WarwickSwap forum, ready for other members of staff to view and request. The scheme goes even further than campus – if an item can’t be rehomed or isn’t required at Warwick anymore, the team will always aim to donate it to charity. “Our goal is to make sure we’re sending as little to landfill as possible,” says Vicky.

A sustainable success

The Furniture Reuse scheme has been an enormous success – the IDF&E team has now rehomed over 1,500 items of furniture since the launch of the scheme in June 2022. That’s a gigantic £220,000 saved on furniture when compared to buying new, and more than 4,000kg of CO2e diverted from disposal and recycling.In fact, our Vice-Chancellor Stuart Croft was so impressed that he selected the team to be his February 'Warwick Wows' award-winner.

Find out more and get involved

Want to learn more about the scheme? Read about the team's award-winning work and visit the Furniture and Interior Design webpage.Link opens in a new window

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