Reposted, with thanks, from The Ecospot Blog.

Quite often, it is the things that go unnoticed that have the biggest impact. Take fire labels for instance. They are a small part of a chair, or sofa, yet without these little pieces of legislative fabric, the whole piece of furniture cannot be reused. And even though they do seem small, they are often cut off as they flap about under cushions – and many of us do not realise that this then consigns our furniture to landfill at the end of its life. Understanding these challenges, both small and large, is the baton that The Great Recovery has taken up in their ‘Rearranging the Furniture’ Design Residency in collaboration with SUEZ.

And to celebrate the end of the project, The Great Recovery held a day as part of the London Design Festival, with a roundtable discussion from the experts, designers and practitioners who took part and some practical demonstrations of upholstery.

Traditional techniques

Patrizia Sottile and Andrea Simonutti – of Urban Upholstery are no strangers to reuse, as their pieces use rescued frames which are brought back to life with traditional methods, and the first part of the session was dedicated to a demonstration of how to refurbish a sprung chair, which itself had been recovered for a new life.

Springs were connected with string, meshed together in a pattern that will be both strong and flexible, then covered with hessian, stitched, then covered again with coconut fibres. This is a craft – hand created and little altered in centuries. And, as the Urban Upholsterers explained, allows a piece to be reused, recovered, refurbished and repaired – unlike the cheap and mass produced pieces that we can pick up from chain furniture stores. Cheap construction means that long life, recovery and reuse is often impossible.

We also got to see the ‘Survivor Sofa’ from the ‘Rearranging the Furniture’ project up close – and as well as the beautiful exposed frame, the fabric was something to behold

Created by British fabric manufacturer, Camira, in collaboration with The Great Recovery, the ‘Survivor’ fabric was developed to use as much pre-consumer fabric waste as possible. The new weave is created with 30% recycled wool fibre – recovered, shredded and woven into a new, tweed like fabric. The fibres are from offcuts of Camira fabrics, collected from contractors who use their upholstery range.

And whilst 30% recycled yarn does not sound like a lot, it is actually quite groundbreaking. Each time a fabric is recycled, the yarn shortens, making it increasingly difficult to use in a new fabric – it literally is not strong enough. However, if it is mixed with some virgin wool yarns, a natural recycled fabric is possible. The Survivor fabric is just that – and will hopefully soon be available to specifiers.

On the day, we were able to use the beautiful fabric to create our own cushions, in any variety of the three colourways – blue, red, or violet. Plumping (excuse the pun) for blue and red, each of our cushions was stuffed with recycled (post-consumer) yarn and finished with more traditional skills – we each learnt the ‘invisible stitch’, allowing us to close our cushions with no stitching visible.

Working together

The day concluded with a round table discussion between many of the experts involved in the bulky waste design residency. Representatives came from across The Great Recovery’s network, including Surrey County Council, Suez, Global Action Plan, Camira, London Re-use Network and Surrey Re-use Network, as well as the designers involved in the residency.

Discussion centered on the need to make the services and systems that facilitate furniture reuse as efficient and user friendly as possible. Because, along with considered design of products, achieving this is key to helping connect individuals and organisations with furniture no longer required with those individuals and organisations seeking it.

Behaviour change – from something as simple as not removing a fire label, through to rethinking the timeframes involved in passing on furniture – was seen by many of the panel members as a key part of their own work. Language and the way we talk about ‘waste’ and ‘reuse’ was identified as having much potential to shift our perceptions and the value we place on items that are not brand new.

Data about reuse were raised as a current hurdle but potential opportunity for increasing reuse. May Al-Karooni from Globechain explained the challenges she and others had faced in finding data about reuse and its impact – data valued highly by investors – because unlike recycling, there are not the data available. Globechain are tackling this through the reporting they offer users of their reuse platform – enabling organisations to identify financial savings and social impact from offering furniture and fittings for reuse.

And my cushion? It got its first test on the train back to Brighton from London Bridge, as surprisingly, there were no free seats. Lucky I’d just made one.

It has over 10,000 members ranging across corporates, charities, schools & universities, social enterprises, start-ups and individuals in industry sectors ranging from retail, banking, fashion, food, construction, education and health.

Many businesses, organisations and individuals struggle with what to do with unwanted or redundant items in their day to day businesses and life. Globechain aim to create a local supply chain within a global community to enable the redistribution of goods to social causes rather than landfill.

It seeks to encourage innovation via reuse, recycling and upcycling items amongst its members to create social, economic and environmental good in a simple, fun and convenient way for all.

Founder May Al-Karooni talks to us about the development of Globechain and the impact of its work.

How did the project come about and how does it promote a circular economy?

It began when the bank I worked for moved offices, ordered new office PCs, carpets and furniture and then found that there was no convenient way of offering the old items to charities and local businesses. After hearing the cost to businesses of removal and refurbishment, I saw the potential to solve these problems, reduce waste to landfill  and increase the life of goods whilst at the same time showcasing the social value created for communities in the UK and abroad by these donated resources. Globechain was born!

How did Globechain expand and develop?

The project started with an idea pitched to one of the UK’s largest retailers. They understood the value it had to them and could visualise the impact it would have, not only on their business with respect to cost efficiency, but also to the local community and customers. They became one of the first pioneers to trial the system and the prototype site. Other pioneers in the commercial and construction sector also came on board throughout the year.

Initial findings showed, firstly, that there was definitely an appetite for giving a new home to the fixtures and fittings from the retailer and, secondly, that the system we had put in place created a positive link between our corporate and charity members.

It’s important that our members find the site and system easy to use. The pioneers and Globechain worked closely together with a number of employees dedicated to trialling the site. Their feedback about usability and communication channels between those offering and those seeking resources has helped us to continually improve and develop the site. The platform was redesigned and the back office system has been made more robust with the ability to manage large volumes of transactions.

We offer reports of the social impact of the donations to our members. This reporting data is bespoke to both type of members, corporate and charity, and we continue to make improvements to this based on our learning from the members.

What have you learnt along the way?

We’ve learnt lessons in many areas, from understanding a client’s needs to timing to building trust. A change in behaviour is needed from both our corporate and charity members but the needs of these two groups do not always align. The system we have has had to support a platform that compliments both party’s needs.

What challenges do you face?

The challenges we face are similar to other marketplace platforms, such as creating traction to grow and scale.

Due to their internal processes it can take time to bring large companies on board and this is something we hope we can reduce.

What has the impact been of Globechain’s work?

As well as the direct impacts of reducing waste to landfill, other areas such as employment and upskilling have benefitted indirectly from the types of goods being used, upcycled or redesigned.

The social impact created by the Globechain community’s commitment to reusing resources is diverse:  medical equipment has gone to disaster recovery organisations, benefitting large communities abroad; fixtures and fittings from well-known stores have refurbished charity shops around the UK, and even coffee grinds have found new homes – growing oyster mushrooms and helping unemployed youth to create micro businesses in the community.

As an example, one of our charity members secured fifteen tonnes of goods from one of our corporate members. These items were shipped to Africa to help in communities affected by Ebola. The items, which ranged from medical equipment to office furniture and children’s toys, saved the charity £30,000. They helped a community of approximately 20,000 people, refurbished two hospitals, one school and a local authority office.

I often make the joke that everything in my living room was either given to me or cost £75. But on the whole it is true. I had become a member of the property-owning classes at a particularly bad time; I literally made the offer on my flat the night before Northern Rock crashed and set off the recession in 2008. Six months of subsequent wrangling with the vendor over the lease had not helped my trepidation.

When I finally moved into my flat the boiler went into meltdown. It was a Good Friday. It was snowing. Luckily a plumber friend of my brother came to the rescue and although I had to temporarily leave my new home as soon as I arrived the plumber was at least able to stop water flowing from the defunct boiler into the neighbouring flats.

The upshot, apart from a dramatic arrival for my neighbours, was that my carefully saved ‘furnishing fund’ was sucked into buying a new boiler. People rallied round. My aunt and uncle drove from Wales to bring me a cabinet. My mum and stepdad gave me some antique furniture from the family home, a work friend gave me an armchair. But I had no table, nothing else to sit on and nowhere to store anything.

I had already intended to make my flat as eco-friendly as possible and so was looking at the most suitable paint, the best green cleaning products, the most sustainable flooring. The need to make economies then made me look at second-hand furniture. I found a table in a shop in Surrey, price £75. I sourced a storage cabinet on eBay which exactly fit an alcove space in my living room, put in a bid and secured it for £75. Even better the previous owners delivered it for free, despite having to carry heavy oak up three flights of stairs. But I still had only one chair.

My sofa requirements were reasonably particular: It needed a high back, I needed to be able to lie down on it, it had to be a sofabed, so I had somewhere to put visitors, and it needed to be cheap. Walking past a local charity shop one day I noticed the window arrangement had been changed to feature a sofabed. It looked the right size, it had a high back and I definitely could lie down on it. The charity didn’t know the sofa’s back story but it looked harmless enough. When I found out that the price was £75 I knew we were meant to be.

Seven years on and the sofa has served well. It has witnessed various parties, as well as evenings alone being lain on to watch films, to read, to sew, to eat, to laugh and to cry. Opened out into a bed it has provided a place of rest for visitors from across the world. Old friends from Australia and China, new friends from Iceland and South Korea, family from France and Greece, all have passed through and remarked on the comfort of sleeping on it. The promise of access to my sofabed in London is an offer constantly made during my own frequent travels.

Seven years on and I want to redecorate. I also want a bigger sofabed and so our relationship is coming to an end. But I did not want to cast off my old faithful into the wilderness of the local tip, there’s more life in the old dog yet and so I took some time to consider its future.

My friend’s two daughters have just graduated from university and are moving to Brighton and so I offered them my sofa.  Not only does this stop yet another perfectly good piece of furniture from ending up in landfill, it makes me happy to think of my sofabed helping the next generation set up their first home. I know it will serve them well.

Image courtesy of the Furniture Re-use Network

I am becoming increasingly motivated and inspired by what I am hearing from those who deal with unwanted, surplus and discarded products. For the first time I think the waste management, recycling and resources sectors are having a reusable lightbulb moment, and are understanding that, in addition to the benefit of re-use for business, more consideration must be given to the consumer and the people that live in the society we all serve. Certain waste sector representatives appear to be suggesting moving away from material-based recycling tonnage targets to instead embracing the concept of targeting the value in discarded resources, thereby maintaining the value of products by keeping them in use for as long as possible. If these opinions and motivations are put into action I suggest we could see an early transformation in the waste and re-use sector that could lay the foundations for a possible circular economy.

The challenge

The re-use of products, be they waste or not, is a key starting point for the circular economy agenda; and making sure that poverty alleviation for the excluded consumer is recognised as a driver for change is a factor all stakeholders in a circular economy might like to embrace.

However, it is these questions about how we achieve a circular economy in our society today that I ponder:

• Can we really develop a circular economy purely from a waste and resources point of view?
• Can we secure the buy-in of the producers and retailers who actually control the production and supply consumers with these goods and services?
• And what about the consumer? Will they be able to deal with this major evolution of the supply and demand chain?
• If the government is ‘managing’ the economy and the state is very much in retreat, are we stuck with the status quo or worse? Who else could step-up and push for change for the environment and for a better and fairer society for people to live in?

Certain sectors are breaking from tradition and are now challenging the status quo by pushing for the adoption of circular economy principles. Change and leadership is coming from industry. Industry now needs to look at whether the consumer can handle a major upheaval of the consumer society. For me, the answer is yes. If we are to make doing the right thing appealing rather than necessary then we must identify the social benefits as well as purely technical and financial ones.

Well matched corporate social responsibility

The innovative partnerships that the small team at Furniture Re-use Network (FRN) run with major retailers and partners brought in over 78,000 furniture and electrical items, saving low income families £12 million on essential goods last year in the UK. This is on top of the three million items supplied by our members across the UK that have saved 380,000 tonnes of CO2 and helped nearly one million low income households save £340 million on essential goods. The FRN has the ambition to reduce waste and support those in need within society and so do many partners we work with.

The greatest success that the FRN has in working with commercial businesses comes about when they are innovative and have an understanding of the social context and value involved in re-use. They’ve seen the opportunity for a service-based partnership that meets their business needs and comes with the bonus of adding value to local communities. These successful partnerships connect the social agenda with their people, their staff, and their customers. The connection is the ‘human’ part of people, their relation to society and their wish to help their neighbours and their own communities.

In my opinion the current circular economy debate can learn much from the re-use sector’s transformative partnerships with manufacturers and retailers. Once the logistics are in place it is crucial that we make ongoing improvements to these supply partnerships by:

1. Encouraging behaviour change
2. Using legislative and regulatory imperatives
3. Using the individual commercial retailer’s competitive nature to encourage sister sites to compete for higher social value as well as profit, thus increasing the drive for re-use.

It probably will not surprise you that much of the impetus for a business wanting to support local social concerns is down to their own Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) targets.

What we find is that, for a really impactful CSR-based partnership to work, it must mirror or match the business activities. Re-use offers costs savings and value to the customer, and key to this working is the business wanting to see real social benefit, not just in the eyes of their customers but for their staff too. If you remove the human resource from CSR you are simply left with a public relations exercise.

Staff within businesses are increasingly motivated by social benefits, perhaps not always at director-level, but this is certainly the case for the staff that the Re-use sector interacts with in warehouses, in yards, and on the back of vehicles: they are motivated to help their own communities, their neighbour or someone in their family.

Re-use and Local and National Government

Local Authority waste departments are guided and restrained by distant or overseas recycling markets and longstanding, some say outdated, regulatory targets – but re-use is visible and local. Local authorities could find real and tangible benefits from re-use if they wholly embraced it. Interestingly, one question that has been put to me recently is, “Do local authorities need to be involved in Re-use and waste prevention? Could waste prevention be the sole responsibility of society and communities?” Well, the majority of the FRN’s members are there to support those in poverty and people with other social needs – so my first reaction would be that the sector cannot subsidise the state on waste as well as on welfare. Although saying that, the options of such devolved responsibility could be explored.

The FRN’s work benefits from collaborations with governmental departments and agencies. In turn, we have been able to highlight the real and quantifiable benefits for them by savings to their budgets through incorporating re-use: we need their leadership, ambition, and action, and they in turn need ours.

There is constant policy discussion about the “definition of waste” – and this always throws up a whole host of arguments about products, waste and goods being placed back on the market having previously been used. The re-use sector diligently complies with waste regulations – and we’re happy to do so – we don’t need them changing. This is a departure from what needs to be looked at. What we should be considering is greater emphasis on the principles of “Duty of Care” – not solely for waste handling but extended to a duty for the waste collector and holder to ensure that products are safe and fit for purpose. It is the duty of this holder that needs regulating and not that of the re-use processor.

Circular and Sustainable Futures from Re-use

Because of austerity and welfare cuts, the re-use sector is doing what it can by stepping up to help those that cannot help themselves. But, it is ambition and action from all stakeholders that we need to make re-use more sustainable and more impactful as a business activity and to ensure that the social and environmental benefits are preserved and increased.

Here’s an idea to ponder – Does a better society equal better business? Can a practical and focused CSR strategy bring businesses more profit and profile?

The business and public sectors have long avoided considering this, seeing the possibility of it as a disruption or risk. However, for the resources sector this kind of ‘disruption’ is welcomed as a possible future and a new business activity.

If the various sectors have the audacity and scope to make the circular economy vision a reality then let’s start with re-use, and get the retailers, manufacturers and consumers involved and on-side.

Resources are scarce and demand must be balanced with supply. We need to recognise that people are an essential part of the economy. If we believe it is right to make this change and we believe that we can do it, then let’s begin, expand our boundaries, have with real ambition, and take inspiration from what is practical today.

Read The Great Recovery’s report on furniture waste and re-use here.

The Great Recovery takes a unique, design-focused approach to the circular economy. In our explorative design residency project in partnership with recycling and waste company SUEZ, we challenged a team of pioneering designers to investigate the materials streams and systems that lead our sofas prematurely to the skip.

The question we ask is: ‘How can we design better systems that will increase rates of re-use and reduce the quantity of bulky items reaching landfill and incineration?’

The Great Recovery’s emphasis has always been on the practical, experiential nature of the redesign process, and this residency allows us to bring together designers, waste managers, local authorities, re-use experts and others. Using Surrey as our sample county, we visit Leatherhead waste transfer station and community recycling centre, Surrey Reuse Network and also gather insights from a retailer, IKEA. The designers conduct a tear-down exercise on a sofa picked from a landfill skip, and learn about some of the challenges involved in creating more effective infrastructure for re-use. Finally, they come up with a series of seven scenarios for ‘closing the loop’ on our big-ticket waste, including non-removable fire labels, a ‘deconstruction’ manual and new models for financing and materials tracking.

The report charts the journey taken by the designers in their quest for products and systems that recognise inherent material value and that account for environmental and social costs and benefits. Recommendations for designers and manufacturers, waste managers, policymakers and local authorities provide practical pointers whilst seeking to encourage a culture of innovation, partnership and long term thinking.

Watch The Survivor Sofa film

To download the report enter your email address below or download here