Local authorities need to understand and grasp what re-use can be, says an exasperated Craig Anderson, chief executive of The Furniture ReUse Network (FRN). He has good reason to be frustrated.
Furniture re-use – the redistribution of unwanted but usable furniture to those that need to furnish homes cheaply or for free – has been around since the 1980s; yet many councils still don’t seem to understand the benefits the re-use sector brings to both waste management and social services budgets.
In terms of waste management, while a single sofa might seem a small saving from landfill, Anderson points out in 2012/13 the FRN network reused 2.7m items of furniture and electrical equipment. This equates to 110,000 tonnes of waste prevented. With landfill tax and other costs associated with landfill, this adds up to an enormous saving.
As for the social impact, Anderson says this level of re-use saves low-income families across the UK around £350m. The knock-on benefits in savings to councils and central government are much more substantial and long-term: if you enable people to furnish their homes affordably, you help them avoid the slippery slope of high interest loans, crime and other social disorder that can come from poverty. You also decrease the requirement for state intervention.
No wonder that the Local Government Association put out a call in January for residents to keep re-use in mind when throwing out unwanted furniture and a select few councils are finally beginning to realise the benefits.
Leicester City Council announced at the end of last year that it had saved £20,000 and diverted six tonnes of potential waste from landfill in just two months by using re-use furniture for recipients of community support grants looking to furnish their new homes.
Anderson says a few other councils have woken up to the opportunity too, pointing at schemes at Doncaster MBC and West Berkshire Council as good examples. Yet these few good examples make the fact that so many other councils are still not realising the benefits re-use can bring all the more infuriating. The key issue is communication, says Anderson.
‘The main barrier is a cultural issue,’ he explains. ‘Local authorities are quite blinkered in the way they work. If you are in the waste department you just think about waste and your budget to deal with it.
‘If you are in the social services department you think about poverty and the local community and typical ways of means of helping. The two are in these silos, not communicating.’
‘What we are calling for is the departments to break through those silos, to talk to each other at a national level and a local level.’
This communication would mean designated areas at tips for furniture to be left would be set up, safely protecting the furniture from the weather, ready to be picked up by FRN members.
It could also mean split waste collection contracts where FRN members can go to homes and collect products directly.
There are numerous options, it just requires an acknowledgement of the impact furniture re-use can make and for departments to work together to find a way of maximising that impact.
‘Local authorities have to look after this sector,’ says Anderson. ‘As a result of the economic downturn in the last five years, and recent welfare reforms, the sector is experiencing a massive increase in demand.’
‘Without support, our members won’t be able to meet that demand and then the obligation to meet it and the fallout from failing to meet it passes to the local authorities.
So they need to wake-up to the reality of what re-use can, and does, offer.’
