Repurpose Implementation Guide by Groundwork London

REPURPOSE: IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE

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1 With the contribution of the LIFE+ financial instrument of the European Community. Project No: LIFE13 ENV/UK/000493

Groundwork London is a registered charity no. 1121105

Contact information Groundwork London is the lead partner on the project and should be contacted in the first instance: Hannah Baker, hannah.baker@groundwork.org.uk or Graham Parry, graham.parry@groundwork.org.uk both contactable on 0207 7922 1230 London Community Resource Network Richard Featherstone, richard.reuse@hotmail.com Middlesex University Tom Dickens, tom.dickens@mdx.ac.uk

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Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................ 5 Brief overview of the project ....................................................................................................... 5 Purpose of this Guide and how to use it ...................................................................................... 5

2.

Background of the project........................................................... 7 Re-use: the current context ......................................................................................................... 7 Particular challenges involved in increasing re-use & reducing fly-tipping on housing estates 11 Policy context ............................................................................................................................. 12

3.

Repurpose: addressing the problem.......................................... 16 Our model .................................................................................................................................. 17 The estates ................................................................................................................................. 18 Our initial impact and findings ................................................................................................... 27 Potential models for replication ................................................................................................ 28

4.

Engaging the community and other stakeholders ..................... 31 Case Study: White City resident ................................................................................................. 33 Recommendations for engaging residents ................................................................................ 35 Recommendations for engaging other stakeholders ................................................................ 36

5.

Developing on-estate re-use hubs – a practical guide .............. 39 Plan your project ........................................................................................................................ 39 Set up shop ................................................................................................................................ 42 Case Study: The Loop @ Grahame Park..................................................................................... 44 Staff, volunteers and systems .................................................................................................... 47 Case Study: Doug ....................................................................................................................... 49 Case Study: Bez .......................................................................................................................... 50 Running the hub ......................................................................................................................... 53 Keep it going .............................................................................................................................. 57

6.

How to monitor and evaluate re-use projects........................... 60 Technical monitoring ................................................................................................................. 60 Other monitoring ....................................................................................................................... 64

7.

Further sources of information ................................................. 66

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Appendices ................................................................................ 69

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Acknowledgements ................................................................... 71 3

INTRODUCTION 4

1. Introduction Brief overview of the project Repurpose is a project run by Groundwork London in partnership with the London Community Resource Network (LCRN) and Middlesex University. Co-financed by the European Commission’s LIFE+ Programme1, it is being delivered from July 2014 to July 2017.

It is centred on the key challenge that despite repeated efforts to engage residents, re-use in housing estates remains low and fly-tipping of bulky waste high.

To address this, Repurpose takes an entirely new approach to encouraging re-use and preventing flytipping, by turning redundant spaces on housing estates into re-use hubs to collect, store, repair and sell re-usable items. These activities are complemented by an in-depth community engagement and behaviour change programme to encourage positive waste behaviours. Additionally, each re-use hub offers accredited training, employment and volunteering opportunities for residents.

Purpose of this Guide and how to use it This practical Guide takes learnings from the Repurpose project to set out advice for bodies across the EU who are interested in delivering similar estate-based community re-use services. The Guide covers the following key elements: •

The background of the Repurpose project and the problems faced;

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The challenges involved in increasing re-use and reducing fly-tipping;

•

Engaging communities and other stakeholders;

•

Practical suggestions for developing on-estate re-use centres;

•

How to monitor and evaluate such projects; and

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Further sources of information.

By adopting the advice set out in this Guide, our work has shown that a Repurpose-type approach to re-using waste on housing estates will not only help reduce re-usable items going to landfill but will also create a greater sense of community cohesion and support local residents to increase their skills and confidence.

Further information on the impact of the Repurpose project more specifically will be shared in our final report and project evaluation which will be published in July 2017 on our website: www.repurpose.london. Residents interested in setting up a re-use service can also look at our reuse toolkit for advice, available at the link above.

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LIFE+ is the European Commission’s financial instrument supporting the implementation, updating and development of EU environmental policy and legislation by co-financing pilot or demonstration projects with European added value. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/life

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BACKGROUND 6

2. Background of the project Re-use: the current context Three quarters of Europe's population live in cities and towns, and this figure is projected to continue to increase2. In 2015, 42% of the EU population lived in flats, one third (33.3%) in detached houses and 24.1% in semi-detached houses. This varied considerably across EU Member States, with the share of people living in flats highest in Spain (65.9%), Latvia (65.0%) and Estonia (62.6%)3. This demonstrates that a high quality, sustainable urban environment is a precondition for a good quality, sustainable lifestyle for the majority of the EU population. As part of this, ensuring effective solutions for increasing re-use and recycling for flat dwellers is a particular priority.

Repurpose focuses on waste, one of the EU’s key environmental challenges. In 2014, the total waste generated in the EU Member States by all economic activities and households amounted to 2,598 million tonnes, equivalent to more than 5 tonnes per inhabitant. On average, over two fifths (43.6%) of this went to landfill sites, and a further 6.5% was incinerated4. The latest figures for England show that over 22 million tonnes of waste were thrown away by households in 2014; approximately 3 tonnes per individual. As reflected in the European averages, less than half of this (44.8%) was recycled, with a larger share going to landfill sites or being incinerated5.

Both these methods create environmental damage. Landfill not only takes up valuable land space, it also causes air, water and soil pollution, discharging carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) into the atmosphere and chemicals and pesticides into the earth and groundwater. This, in turn, is harmful to human health, as well as to plants and animals. Similarly, the air pollutants and dioxins that result from incineration can also damage health and the environment.

The EU’s 7th Environment Action Programme identifies waste prevention and management as one of Europe’s top priorities, with a focus on a circular economy where nothing is wasted and where low carbon growth has been decoupled from resource use6. EU waste management policies (described in more detail below) aim to reduce the environmental and health impacts of waste and improve Europe’s resource efficiency. The role of re-use used to be overshadowed in the political arena by recycling, but re-use is now recognised in the waste hierarchy as one of the best resource efficiency strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Increasing re-use of key household products, such as clothes, household appliances and electrical equipment, could reduce UK greenhouse gas emissions by an average 4 million tonnes CO2e per year between now and 20207.

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World Bank (2015): http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locations=EU Eurostat Housing Statistics (2016): http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statisticsexplained/index.php/Housing_statistics 4 Eurostat Waste Statistics (2016): http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statisticsexplained/index.php/Waste_statistics 5 UK Statistics on Waste (2016): www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/547427/UK_Statistics_on_Waste_st atistical_notice_25_08_16_update__2_.pdf 6 Environment Action Programme to 2020: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/action-programme/ 7 Waste and Resources Action Plan, UK 2009: Meeting the UK Climate Challenge: The Contribution of Resource Efficiency 3

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Challenge: Low levels of re-use Despite the shifting policy focus, levels of re-use, particularly within urban estates, are currently very low. Very little has been done to enable communities on estates, who are often disadvantaged in many ways, to practise re-use as a normal behaviour. Residents often buy cheap, poorly constructed furniture that has a short usage life and gets easily damaged. The habit of fly-tipping bulky waste items on estates, which are then cleared up by the estates’ waste teams and taken to landfill, is prevalent; this in turn reinforces the view that this is a ‘normal’ way to behave.

A UK report by WRAP in 2012 found that of the bulky waste items that are taken to household waste and recycling centres, 36% of items were judged to be re-usable by householders; this increased to 51% if considering items requiring slight repair. For bulky waste items collected at the kerbside, 24% were estimated to be re-usable in their current condition, rising to 40% if items requiring slight repair are taken into account8.

This demonstrates that there are currently missed opportunities for: •

Further reductions in carbon emissions;

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Residual waste to be reduced further;

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Resource lifetimes to be increased.

In the baseline behaviour change survey that we carried out with 20% of residents on each Repurpose estate in Summer 2015 we found that 44% thought that fly-tipping was a normal behaviour as it was then cleaned up, 70% of residents had not even heard of their local bulky waste service and, of those that had heard of it, only 34% had actually used it. Likewise 60% had not heard of their local household waste site and again, of those that had heard of it, only 21% had used it.

Furniture re-use on Samuel Lewis Trust Estate

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Composition and re-use potential of household bulky waste in the UK (2012): www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/UK%20bulky%20waste%20summary.pdf

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Challenge: High levels of fly-tipping Fly-tipping is a serious problem across Europe. In England in 2015/16, for example, local authorities dealt with 936,000 incidents of fly-tipping, at a cost of nearly £50 million. Over two thirds of these incidents involved household waste. 17% of incidents (159,000) were recorded as single items, which includes household items such as furniture and mattresses9. Fly-tipping is normally in urban areas, and Defra’s statistics show that local authority land, such as estates, car parks, parks and open spaces, is one of the most popular sites for dumping.

In our survey we found that 74% of residents agreed there was a lot of fly-tipping in their neighbourhood.

Fly-tipping on Pembury Estate

Challenge: Low levels of local environmental quality Fly-tipping of waste is one of a number of factors that has a negative impact on local environmental quality and resident satisfaction with their local area. The European Environment Agency (EEA) notes that the environment plays a crucial role in people’s physical, mental and social well-being and that despite significant improvements, major differences in environmental quality and human health remain between and within European countries. However, the relationships between environmental factors and human health are complex, taking into account multiple pathways and interactions; as a result they should be seen in a broader spatial, socio-economic and cultural context.

In surveys the public have consistently identified local environmental factors as being one of the most important factors in their well-being. A 2011 survey by Keep Britain Tidy found that the local environment was the public’s third biggest concern10. According to the 2015 Scottish Household Survey, almost a third of adults aged 16 and over felt that rubbish or litter lying around, or animal nuisance such as noise or dog fouling, was a very or fairly common neighbourhood problem (28% and

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Defra (2017): www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/595773/Flytipping_201516_statistic al_release.pdf 10 Keep Britain Tidy (2011): The Word on our Street

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31% respectively)11. The Northern Ireland Crime Survey and Crime Survey for England and Wales reported that in 2014/15, ‘rubbish or litter lying around’ was commonly cited as a significant problem in the local area (26% and 29% respectively)12.

In our survey 55% thought that fly-tipping had an impact on the environment and 60% thought it was a problem. 92% thought however that recycling or re-use would improve the quality of the environment.

Fly-tipping on White City Estate

Challenge: Low levels of community cohesion Community cohesion and resilience is widely considered to be an important factor for residents to feel satisfied with where they live. This is because residents in a cohesive and resilient community tend to feel supported by those around them, feel a sense of belonging, and socialise with others in their community.

However, low levels of community engagement and participation are an issue in urban areas across Europe. This can come about for a number of reasons, including a lack of community engagement and integration opportunities, low skills and resulting employment prospects, poor home conditions and cultural barriers such as language. Disadvantage (i.e. low economic status) and crime and fear have both been found to be negative predictors of cohesion, factors which are traditionally more prevalent in housing estates. Similarly, individuals who rent local authority housing tend to feel that there is less cohesion than individuals who own or are paying off their own homes13.

When we asked our Repurpose residents how many neighbours they could call upon to help them if they needed it (a proxy for community cohesion) we found that 18% could call on no-one and a further 31% could call on less than 5 people.

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Scottish Government (2016): Scotland’s People Annual Report: Results from the 2015 Scottish Household Survey 12 www.justice-ni.gov.uk/news/perceptions-crime-findings-201415-northern-ireland-crime-survey 13 DCLG (2008): Predictors of community cohesion: multi-level modelling of the 2005 Citizenship Survey

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Particular challenges involved in increasing re-use and reducing fly-tipping on housing estates Whilst there are significant opportunities for re-use and recycling of bulky items from blocks of flats, there are also a number of challenges which traditionally have made this difficult: •

The inaccessibility of household waste and recycling centres to many flat owners due to lower car ownership;

•

The lack of provision of council run bulky waste collection services to many estate residents;

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The socio-demographics of flats and higher population turnovers necessitating different and repeated communications and engagement approaches;

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Potentially reusable items need protecting from the elements to maximise re-use and recycling opportunities;

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The challenges involved in the manual handling of bulky items on estates which often have considerable areas that are only accessible by foot;

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Space requirement for the storage of potentially reusable items;

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Flats with a high turnover of residents often generate large amounts of bulky waste in stages when empty properties are cleared and new tenants and landlords dispose of unwanted furniture;

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Antisocial behaviour may be encouraged by storage of reusable items, e.g. items set out may attract arson, impacting on the health and safety of residents.

Pedestrian walkway, Grahame Park Estate

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Policy context The EU’s 7th Environment Action Programme identifies waste prevention and management as one of Europe’s top priorities, with a focus on a circular economy where nothing is wasted and where low carbon growth has been decoupled from resource use.14 While the role of re-use used to be overshadowed in the political arena by recycling, it is starting to be given more prominence in waste policies and is now seen to be one of the best resource efficiency strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

With this in mind, improving re-use on estates directly addresses several pieces of European legislation:

Circular Economy Package The European Commission’s new package contains an EU Action Plan for the Circular Economy, with proposed actions supporting greater recycling and re-use – for example by encouraging Member States to ‘prepare for re-use’ and proposing to open up access for re-use organisations to waste collection facilities. This will be implemented through revised waste legislation, including the Waste Framework Directive and Landfill Directive.

The Waste Framework Directive Directive 2008/98/EC provides the legislative framework for the collection, transport, recovery and disposal of waste, and includes a common definition of waste.15 It requires all Member States to take the necessary measures to ensure waste is recovered or disposed of without endangering human health or causing harm to the environment and includes permitting, registration and inspection requirements. It also requires Member States to take appropriate measures to apply the waste hierarchy and encourage firstly, the prevention or reduction of waste production and its harmfulness and secondly the recovery of waste by means of recycling, re-use or reclamation or any other process with a view to extracting secondary raw materials, or the use of waste as a source of energy. It set a target to recycle or re-use 50% of waste (by weight) from households by 2020, and required the establishment of Waste Prevention Programmes by all Member States by 2013.

Projects such as Repurpose directly address the requirement in Article 11 section (2) (a) which asks Member States to make provision for ‘preparing for re-use’, increasing levels of re-use in waste streams where disposal is currently the major waste disposal option.

The changes to this Directive proposed through the Circular Economy Package would support re-use and repair as well as social enterprises working in this field, including by increasing the recycling and re-use target to 65% by 2030. In March 2017, the European Parliament endorsed a number of proposed changes, including a definition of ‘preparing for re-use’, separate ‘preparing for re-use’ targets away from recycling, and preferential access to the waste stream for social enterprises active in these activities.

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Environment Action Programme to 2020: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/action-programme/ http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32008L0098

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The Landfill Directive Directive 99/31/EC aims to prevent or reduce as far as possible negative effects on the environment from the landfilling of waste, by introducing stringent technical requirements.16 Article Five of the Directive set targets for the level of biodegradable waste that is landfilled, as follows: •

By 2010 reduce biodegradable municipal waste landfilled to 75% of that produced in 1995;

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By 2013 reduce biodegradable municipal waste landfilled to 50% of that produced in 1995;

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By 2020 reduce biodegradable municipal waste landfilled to 35% of that produced in 1995.

Since October 2007, the pre-treatment requirements of the Landfill Directive have included the need to treat all non-hazardous waste (including commercial and industrial) before it can go to landfill.

This treatment must include a physical, thermal, chemical or biological process - which can include sorting - to change the characteristics of the waste to either reduce its volume, reduce its hazardous nature, facilitate its handling, or enhance its recovery.

Re-use directly removes items that are currently destined in their entirety for the residual waste stream. Reducing levels of fly-tipping, which involves objects that historically have had very low levels of diversion from the residual waste stream, also allows more bulky items to be recycled and re-used.

The changes to this Directive proposed through the Circular Economy Package further emphasise the need for a reduction in landfill, including through a binding target to reduce landfill to maximum of 10% of all waste by 2030. They also give priority to re-use and recycling by discouraging the development of excessive capacity for the treatment of residual waste facilities (such as energy recovery or low grade mechanical biological treatment of untreated municipal waste).

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE Directive) Directive 2002/96/EC17 set collection, recycling and recovery targets for all types of electrical goods, with a minimum rate of 4 kg per head of population per annum recovered for recycling by 2009. The Directive provided for the creation of collection schemes where consumers return their WEEE free of charge, which aimed to increase the recycling of WEEE and/or re-use.

Revisions to this Directive in 2012 aimed to increase the collection, re-use and recycling of used electronic and electrical equipment, with minimum targets for each category of WEEE. These targets are accompanied by provisions of greater access for re-use operators and social enterprises to waste collection points.

Projects such as Repurpose can, by including bulky WEEE (such as white goods or consumer electronics) as one of its waste streams, contribute to the increased recovery of such materials for re-use or, if impractical, recycling.

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http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:31999L0031 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32002L0096

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Ecodesign Directive Directive 2009/125/EC established a framework for the setting of ecodesign requirements for energy-related products18, with a requirement to consider several environmental aspects including possibilities for re-use, recycling and recovery of materials and/or of energy. It encourages design that supports ease of re-use and recycling, and the avoidance of technical solutions detrimental to re-use and recycling of components and whole appliances.

The Commission’s Ecodesign Working Plan 2016-2019 recognises that the possibility to repair or recycle a product and re-use its components and materials depends largely on the initial design of the product. It also commits the Commission to explore more systematically the possibility to establish product requirements relevant for the circular economy such as durability, reparability, upgradeability, design for disassembly, information, and ease of re-use and recycling.

Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive Directive 94/62/EC19 aimed to limit the production of packaging waste and promoted recycling, re-use and other forms of waste recovery. It required Member States to set up systems for re-use or recovery, including recycling of the packaging and/or packaging waste collected, and emphasised that final disposal should be considered as a last resort. It also focused on design, requiring packaging to be designed, produced and commercialised in such a way as to permit its re-use or recovery, including recycling.

Revisions to the Directive have clarified the definition of the term ‘packaging’, increased the targets for recovery and recycling of packaging waste, and granted new Member States transitional periods for attaining the recovery and recycling targets. Proposals to revise this Directive as part of the new Circular Economy Package include increasing preparing for re-use and recycling targets for packaging waste and the simplification of the set of targets.

As a member of the EU, the UK’s waste legislation has been shaped by EU waste legislation for many years, and in turn this has filtered down to regional and local approaches to waste management.

Relevant national policies include Waste Regulations, WEEE Regulations, and the Environmental Protection Act. However, the implementation of EU waste law in the UK context has not always been straightforward. This has included a lack of clarity surrounding what certain elements of legislation mean in operational terms. For more information on the re-use policy context, including at the national (UK) and regional (London) level, see our Policy Pack which is available at www.repurpose.london/pages/repurposeresources.

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http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32009L0125 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:01994L0062-20150526

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ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM 15

3. Repurpose: addressing the problem Repurpose aims to increase levels of re-use on London’s housing estates. It focuses on a waste stream that causes notable problems within estates (fly-tipping) but has the potential to deliver significant environmental, social and economic gains.

The project’s key objectives are to: •

Increase re-use in target estates by 25% - helping to address the costs to the local authority and housing associations of low re-use in estates, as well as the wider environment.

•

Reduce incidents of fly-tipping on estates by 25% - helping to address the cost to managing agents and local authorities of clearing fly-tipping, in addition to the negative impact on local environmental quality and impact on well-being/mental health.

•

Increase the capacity and skills of resident communities on target estates – helping to address the levels of deprivation and employability linked to poor levels of environmental quality.

This is being achieved by: •

Developing a transferable methodology for resident engagement resulting in behaviour change to support an uptake in re-use and recycling on each participating estate.

•

Creating five community collection, repair and re-use hubs in under-used spaces on each participating estate.

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Launching and delivering a re-use collection and redistribution service on each of the participating estates.

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Creating training, employment and volunteering opportunities for local people.

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Designing an evaluation methodology capturing technical performance and behavioural change impacts of the project.

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Developing interactive e-learning materials including an implementation guide and policy pack to inform local, national and EU policy, strategy and best practice.

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The Repurpose project is operating pilots on five housing estates in London. The five locations can be seen in the map below.

The estates are spread throughout the city and vary in size and scale. They are typically representative of estate housing types across London and the UK.

Our model On each estate we set up the following services: 1. A re-use hub (which we called a Loop) from which activity took place 2. A free on-foot furniture collection service from people’s homes 3. Events and activities to engage residents 4. Training and volunteering opportunities for residents 5. Sales of low cost furniture to residents We have also been monitoring everything we do to provide evidence of our impact, as well as working to integrate the services into each local estate’s plans.

Each estate programme is housed in a previously unused space which has been converted to a re-use hub. It offers a doorstep collection service of reusable items, as well as sourcing items from flytipping locations, doing small repairs and upcycling activities, and then making the items available for residents to purchase at low cost. These hubs also provide valuable locations for the project’s programme of training and volunteering, ensuring that residents develop long-term skills and helping signpost them towards a potential career in sustainability and re-use.

The model aims to create a ‘closed loop’ within these estates, reducing the quantity of perfectly usable (and repairable) household goods ending up in landfill and redistributing these essential household items to low income families.

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The overarching aim of the community engagement work within Repurpose has been to change attitudes, in essence raising participants’ awareness of the environmental problems relating to waste and fly-tipping and of wider concepts of sustainable, resource-efficient lifestyles and enabling them to change their individual and collective choices accordingly.

However beyond changing attitudes, engaging residents has also been a form of marketing; telling them about the services available at the Loop and encouraging them to get involved with donating and purchasing items.

Below we detail more about the five pilot estates and how the project has evolved on each estate.

The estates Grahame Park Estate, Barnet Key partner: Genesis Housing Households: 1,777 Key estate information: This estate covers a wide area on an old airfield, with a mixture of low rise, low density housing and low blocks.

It is going through a significant regeneration programme which involves the demolishing, re-modelling and rebuilding of the entire estate on an area by area basis.

Many residents are being rehoused off-site and new private homes, shops and community facilities and amenities are being added. The management of the estate will be taken over by Genesis Homes (from Barnet Homes) area by area. We have located our project on the main shopping concourse in the centre of the estate. This area is due for demolition in the next 3 years.

Key project delivery information:

We have been able to take over an abandoned William Hill betting shop to become our re-use hub; housing storage, retail and workshop space. This is a perfect size for the project and is located on the main estate shopping concourse, next to the community centre, library, post office, pharmacy and children’s centre, so has lots of footfall. Due to the size of the space available, and visibility of the site, we have been able to attract a large number of regular volunteers for whom the project is having a huge personal impact. The shop has proved particularly successful, selling over 100 items/month.

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Map showing the location of The Loop @ Grahame Park

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Andover Estate, Islington Key partner: Islington Council Estate size: 800 households Key estate information: The estate is near Finsbury Park tube station and consists of a number of medium-rise blocks around a central courtyard with community amenities. The area of the estate is reasonably small. This estate is one of the worst in Islington for fly-tipping but has an efficient system whereby caretakers clear up fly-tipped items within four hours. Our re-use hub is based within the workshop of re-use enterprise Bright Sparks who operate a re-use scheme for householders within Islington but do not engage with the estate themselves.

Key project delivery information: We are operating out of a very small workshop space, within Bright Sparks’ storage and fixing workshops, with additional storage space in a single garage. We have no dedicated retail space but sell items through the Bright Sparks workshop and through pop-up shops on the estate. These restrictions have meant that the collections and sales element of the project has been far smaller in scale than on other estates and there has been limited space to accommodate volunteers. Instead the project has focused very heavily on the behaviour change and community engagement elements of the Repurpose programme, in which it has been very successful.

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Map showing the location of The Loop @ Andover

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Pembury Estate, Hackney Key partner: Peabody Trust Estate size: 800 households Key estate information: This estate has a mixed demographic and is sited within an up and coming area. It is a mixture of mid-rise blocks, maisonettes and bungalows; some of them dating back from the 1930s. It has recently undergone regeneration with new blocks (including a large number of privately owned apartments) and a new community centre. The mixture of tenancies in the estate has provided The Loop with a continuous donation of furniture that is then sold back to the community. The area was the centre in Hackney for the riots in 2011. Peabody has been investing significantly in community development since then.

Key project delivery information: The Pembury project has operated out of a set of 19 underground garages sited in a great position on the estate near the community centre. Planning permission has recently been granted to convert nearby garages, after a long process with the Housing Association, with refurbishment works taking place in Spring 2017. The current location has been used as a space predominantly for storage and basic repairs since it has only basic lighting and no electrics. This has limited our visibility, sales capacity and ability to accommodate volunteers. Sales and resident engagement has predominantly been via pop-up shops and events.

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Map showing the location of The Loop @ Pembury

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Samuel Lewis Trust Estate, Southwark Key partner: Southern Housing Estate size: 300 households Key estate information: This small estate is made up of five low rise parallel blocks with a small space for community amenities at the far end of the estate. This community area has recently been substantially developed to add a hall, basketball court and bike lockers. The estate used to be a site for antisocial behaviour in the area but as a result of these efforts, and that of the tenants group and caretakers to improve the look of the estate, has turned itself around.

Key project delivery information: As there was no suitable site for a hub on the estate, two containers were placed onsite in October 2015 to be the hub for the Loop’s services there. Following resident consultation further funding was sought to clad and plant around these to soften their look. The small size of the estate and the containers limits the amount of items processed for re-use. Instead the project has focused on community engagement and supporting volunteering, with a small number of dedicated volunteers assisting each week.

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Map showing the location of The Loop @ SLT

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White City Estate, Hammersmith & Fulham Key partner: Hammersmith & Fulham Council Estate size: 2000 households Key estate information: This large estate has an active set of local groups and is the recipient of Big Local funding (3 years into a 10 year programme) to increase community activity. It is predominantly medium-rise blocks, designed around community facilities at the centre of the site (including a school, community hall and playground). It is very close to six large building developments which will change the nature and look of the area around the White City tube station over the coming years.

Key project delivery information: The White City hub is operating out of four small storage undercrofts spread around the estate, previously used for caretakers’ storage. They were quick to get into a usable condition and the re-use service was successful very quickly, but after about six months the constraint of the small amount of space in each location and the multiple locations started to limit activities. Sales and collections have been strong but there is little space for workshop activities and accommodating volunteers which has limited our capacity for these activities.

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Map showing the location of The Loop @ White City

Our initial impact and findings To date (after 17 months of operation) we’ve significantly exceeded most of our original targets.

We’ve: • Removed over 6,000 bulky items (87+ tonnes) from the waste stream.

• Provided over 3,000 items of low cost furniture to low income and vulnerable families.

• Changed behaviour on waste, re-use and recycling through 52 events, with over 4,200 residents and 5 schools involved in the programme to date (our target was for 50 events, directly involving 850 households with our wider reach extending to 3,800 households, and engaging 5 schools).

• Provided local volunteering and employment for over 100 volunteers.

• Created over £640,000 in social value through new community connections and skills gained.

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We have worked alongside residents of the five estates throughout the life of the project, giving them the opportunity to be involved on a range of levels; beyond being involved in donations and sales this has included having the opportunity to volunteer in our workshop, attend events and become project ambassadors. The greater amount of involvement from residents, the more they have felt that the Loop is ‘their’ project.

The particular elements that have worked well on each estate have depended on the estate’s size, the degree of support from our local partners and the size and nature of the space available to operate our re-use hub from. However on each estate the programme has been hugely socially impactful through its provision of opportunities for volunteers, the provision of low cost furniture and events encouraging increased skills and community cohesion.

So, although we started off with five identical services, these evolved over time into models that fitted each estate’s circumstance.

Potential models for replication From our experience with Repurpose, we have developed three three models for operating an estate-based re-use programme. These models (A, B and C) are broadly defined by estate size as this seems to be the key factor in the success of the programme. However, the success of the models will also depend on other factors such as staff and the availability of space. A flow chart to help you decide on the right model for your estate is available on page 40. For the rest of this guide we have focused on how to run Model A: A Full-Time Service.

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Type

A: Full-time service

B: Part-time service

C: Periodic events-based service

Size

Large estate 1,750+ households

Medium estate ~800 households

Small estate ~250 households

Staff

1 x Retail, Enterprise and Development Coordinator

1 x Re-use Coordinator

1 x Re-use Coordinator (PT)

1 x Assistant (PT)

1 x Workshop Manager 1 x Assistant Hub

Large visible single location of at least 180m2 with workshop, retail and storage. May need planning permission.

Large visible single location of at least 100m2 with workshop, retail and storage. May need planning permission.

Collections

5 days/week to keep stock coming in

3 days/week to keep stock Limited, periodic coming in collections (1 day/week)

Sales

At least 5 days/week including 1 weekend day

3 days/week including 1 weekend day

Events

At least once/month to At least once/month to keep residents engaged keep residents engaged and programme visible and programme visible

In community centre/existing space focusing on skills

Volunteers

Helping with all elements

Helping run events and collections

Helping with all elements 2/3 a day onsite

No hub needed necessarily, just dry space for storage of items.

Once a month at pop-up shops/events

4/5 a day onsite Set up items

Full workshop and collections toolset needed

Full workshop and collections toolset needed

Basic tools and gazebo for sales/events

Costs

High. Refurb costs £1045,000. Tools etc £58,000. Running costs ~£75-100,000/year.

Medium. Refurb costs £525,000. Tools etc £3-6,000.

Running costs ~£4565,000/year.

Will need secure and dry storage area (~£5,000).Tools etc ~£1,500. Running costs £5-15,000/year.

Longevity

Work towards a Social Will always need funding Enterprise model after 3 support. years.

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Will always need small funding support.

STAKEHOLDERS 30

4. Engaging the community and other stakeholders As engaging stakeholders, both residents and other partners, is such an essential part of the Repurpose project we’ve separated out recommendations around this area.

Activities undertaken in Repurpose to engage residents have included: •

Engagement planning - a plan was developed for each estate as how to best engage specific residents.

•

Door knocking to initially advertise the service to residents and to engage them in a behaviour change/attitude baseline survey. Also performed periodically throughout project to advertise events and workshops.

•

Communications materials in paper form (leaflets and posters), through banners and online via Facebook groups. These were developed through a branding process with local pro bono architects, which helped to develop a logo and name.

•

Estate mapping to establish residents’ understanding of where fly-tipping hot spots were in order to gather information on how the estate was being used.

•

School workshops for schools local to the estates, primarily working with Year 4 pupils.

Workshops included a drama-based “No More Room for Rubbish” session and upcycling workshops which allowed us to cover art and design, geography and drama. These workshops facilitated a positive first introduction to the students about the project and enabled us to make contact with many of the local parents.

“I learnt don’t leave rubbish on the floor, donate to charity for people to use it.

I enjoyed creating my picture frame.” Jayden Age 10 – St John XXIII Primary

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•

Interactive events around key calendar events (Christmas, Spring clear outs, etc), focused on addressing key behaviours: these have included pop-up shops, bring and take days and craft sessions.

•

Workshops to enable residents to learn new skills and to encourage them to use them in their everyday lives. These workshops have covered practical skills such as DIY, chair upholstery and decoupage.

•

Training delivered to key project volunteers and Ambassadors to enable them to support their Loops. The training involved trips to a recycling facility and workshops on upcycling followed by each ambassador filling out a pledge card on how they would support their Loop.

•

Corporate volunteering facilitated the delivery of activities such as pop-up shops, upcycling workshops and door knocking.

Ideas for community and school engagement events, resident engagement plans, and some case studies from events we carried out during the Repurpose project are provided in Appendix 1.

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Case study: Ageno Phipps House resident and Loop enthusiast What kind of impact has the Loop had in the local community?

It has enabled re-use to be looked at in a new way. You can often find quirky, stylish, practical and quite hip items which cater to a variety of tastes. The Loop has changed mindsets and educated residents about the environment.

What is your favourite thing about the Loop and why?

I love that it is local and I love that it contributes to the local community.

I love how easily accessible it is, being a walk around the corner and that I don't have to wait days to use the service provided. They have very helpful staff and do a free collection. It’s so easy to use in terms of donating.

Why is a project / service like the Loop needed in a place like White City?

It's a big community and the Loop makes use of thrown away items. The Loop repurposes and educates on re-use. It educates people and provides another option which is just around the corner. It is reversing a throwaway culture.

Do you think the Loop has made a difference in changing residents’ behaviour towards re-use / fly-tipping / the local environment?

On behalf of other residents and neighbours, yes. My neighbours have used it so yes, certainly it has had an impact. I have overheard others referring people to the Loop saying that you can find great things there.

It's had a very positive effect.

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Activities to engage other stakeholders have included: •

Mapping of local stakeholders as part of Engagement Plan development. This also reviewed existing community resources, potential barriers to engagement and existing engagement activities.

•

Meetings with local relevant stakeholders to explore the potential for partnership working.

•

Workshops for caretakers to engage them with the ethos of the project and how they can actively engage with it.

•

High profile launch events to which residents and stakeholders were invited.

•

Establishment of Steering Groups on certain estates so local partners and residents could have an impact on decision-making.

•

Partnership working with both housing providers and other local stakeholders to allow the project to establish itself and promote the service it is offering. This work has included hosting masterclasses for project beneficiaries and other housing providers, and attending events organised by local, regional and national groups.

Launch event at Grahame Park Estate

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Recommendations for engaging residents •

Plan your engagement using an engagement plan to map out staff hours and resources needed; this will be especially useful if you are delivering a re-use service across multiple sites.

•

Start reaching out to communities from the start. Prior to each Loop securing their hub spaces, each coordinator ran a series of events and involved themselves in other stakeholders’ events to start forming links with the local community. This allowed us to start promoting the upcoming service before the official opening of the Loops and identify key volunteers who wanted to become involved with the project.

•

Try to establish links with existing groups that already have a strong local following; this is less time consuming than engaging individuals on a one to one basis and can be a mutually beneficial arrangement if the group has something to gain from the re-use service. Groups that we have engaged with include tenant and resident associations (TRAs), cultural and ethnic groups, youth clubs and other charitable projects. This allows newly established re-use services to become part of the wider estate community, giving access to resources and residents that would have otherwise required a greater deal of staff time and expenditure to access.

•

The community centre, local TRA, estate staff and local councillors are all essential partners and are worth engaging from the start to ensure their buy-in and support throughout the project.

•

Caretakers are particularly useful allies and can alert you to potentially useful furniture that has been or is about to be disposed of. You can run a simple workshop with them to introduce them to the programme and how the activities you will be doing will reduce their workload. As there can be a high turnover of estate staff this will need to be refreshed on a regular basis. Be friendly as these will be the faces you will see around the estate most often!

•

Tailor your approach to the local community. Even within the same geographic area communities can be very diverse and something that works for one won’t necessarily work for all. Tailoring times and activities will help lead to greater community involvement. For example, we arranged the launch of the Loop at Grahame Park to take place just after Mosque prayers on a Friday which brought large numbers of the Muslim community into the event.

•

Be visible. Attend, and contribute to, local events and be visible outside the hub itself rather than waiting for customers to come to you. Put up big vinyl banners advertising the service; these are inexpensive and highly visible and less permanent than other signage, so easier to get agreement on from partners or estate staff. Permanent signage by bins is useful but will take time to broker with estate staff. Example promotional materials are provided in Appendix 2.

•

Create an easily accessible name and branding. We soon realised that the project name, Repurpose, was not clear in terms of communicating what we did, so developed a working name for the estates of The Loop, with clear branding and logos.

•

Use existing systems rather than creating new ones. Contact new residents via the housing provider, through a leaflet in the resident pack. Put posters up in communal areas where residents are used to reading notices. These, and other materials, should clearly communicate what you do and don’t do and what kind of items you can and cannot take.

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•

Run a variety of events at varying times to appeal to different members of the community.

Residents may not be free during traditional working hours and different activities will appeal to different people. Food and activities for children are always a draw and will help to bring residents into the hub.

•

Use volunteers to help undertake activities that require lots of hands, including leafleting and pop-up shops. One-off volunteers can come from a variety of sources; businesses are often looking for interesting activities and having them on hand increases the productivity of activities, including: more sales at pop-up shops; turning around more furniture at upcycling workshops; and speaking to more people at door knocking exercises. Corporate volunteering can also provide an additional revenue stream for a project. We have regularly engaged corporates and have also worked with youth groups, GoodGym and volunteering sites like TimeBank.

•

Other residents can be your best messengers. Word of mouth is incredibly powerful; if you can engage a group of resident volunteers to undertaken door knocking this will add extra weight to the message you are trying to convey as fellow residents are more likely to take on board information given to them by someone from their community.

•

Regularly engage your community via social media and notice boards.

•

Report back to residents and other stakeholders on the success of the programme at regular intervals.

•

Be friendly and welcoming and polite –this will help encourage people to come back!

Recommendations for engaging other stakeholders When engaging with external stakeholders on such initiatives, it is worth considering the following guidance: •

Understand each stakeholder’s role, priorities and interests – different stakeholders will need to be involved in the project for different reasons, and are likely to have their own goals (which may or may not match the objectives of the project itself). The working relationship will be much more effective if these factors are understood and built into the engagement process from the start.

•

Engage at the right level of the organisation – senior members of staff may be the decisionmakers but may not have time to engage; whereas less senior members may be essential to work with on a day to day basis but may need to seek approval for big decisions.

•

Engage each stakeholder at the right time – different stakeholders will be key to different stages in a project; some will be vital in the preparation phase, whereas others will need to be involved in dissemination. Consider each stakeholder’s contribution to the project and ensure that clear plans for working with them are put in place in advance.

•

Sell the benefits – as set out in this Guide, there are many potential benefits of these projects. However, housing providers are likely to have a number of competing priorities, which may mean that re-use is not part of their plans. Highlighting the clear environmental, social and economic benefits of such a project will help to demonstrate why it should be given priority; this will also help to secure funding.

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•

Draw up a partnership agreement at the start, setting out each partner’s role and responsibilities, as well as timeframes for key activities. Plan regular progress meetings and reports as appropriate to the project, to ensure that progress towards objectives is tracked.

•

Keep nurturing relationships rather than seeing engagement as a one-off activity. New local groups might get established, who will need to be contacted.

•

Social media helps you keep in contact, so set up a local page/group and join the groups of other local organisations.

•

Establish a good contacts database to manage all your contacts. A simple version can be made in Excel.

Identifying relevant stakeholders List potential stakeholders: as many as you can think of. What might they get out of working with you on this project? For instance: Residents – Access to low cost furniture and appliances, new collection services for household goods, improved relationships with their neighbours and housing provider Collection authorities - Reducing the waste burden, better services to residents meaning improved relationship with the public, potential cost savings on bulky waste collections Local waste services - Reduction in residual waste, better processing of materials, better public relations Re-use organisations - More stock and better choice of stock, income from collections to support sustainability, increased sales Charity shops - Regular supply of stock in a cost effective way Make a stakeholder map: Identify specific organisations as above. What level (high/low) of interest in the project and influence in the sector does each organisation have?

Prioritise stakeholders: Those with a high level of interest and influence will be your key targets for engagement.

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PRACTICAL GUIDE 38

5. Developing on-estate re-use hubs – a practical guide The following pages set out some key considerations and recommendations for housing providers interested in developing re-use hubs, covering the principal stages from planning and establishing partnerships to running the hub and selling stock.

The experiences of the Repurpose project working in the five London estates has led to a number of transferrable lessons being learned, which will also be applicable to others interested in establishing similar initiatives. Examples from the Repurpose project are therefore used to illustrate the considerations and recommendations set out below.

Whilst the focus of the Repurpose project has been on urban housing estates in the UK, arguably housing estates across many European countries face similar challenges regarding waste and flytipping, and therefore the lessons learned remain widely relevant.

Plan your project Before you start trying to set up your project you will need to establish: •

Some key figures on your estate and the amount of furniture items that that go to waste

•

The kind of service model you want to aim for (see page 29)

•

Whether there are any free unused locations that could be used to run the project from

•

How you will monitor the project

•

The support of the residents

•

Support from other stakeholders

•

A plan of action and engagement

Your estate You should already have information about who lives on your estate. But you will need to ensure you understand what the key problems on the estate are. Social isolation? Unemployment? Lack of cohesion? Fly-tipping and anti-social behaviour? Talk to your colleagues about this – you could also source opinions from residents about what they see the key issues to be.

It is likely to be useful to find out key demographic information about the estate, such as the age of people living there, types of households, and the languages spoken, as this can help to make the case for a re-use initiative and the social benefits it offers. It is also useful to identify the location of existing key services and infrastructure, such as second-hand shops, waste and recycling sites, schools and community centres. Guidance on creating estate and area profiles, and examples from the Repurpose project, are provided in Appendix 3.

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Finding out about how many items go to waste can be more difficult. Whilst some estates measure this, others use contractors that collect the waste from multiple estates in the same vans. For our project we carried out some simple visual surveys, going around the estate counting the amount of fly-tipped items left outside on the street over a period of two weeks so that we had some idea of the amount of items being thrown away.

Finding a space on the estate is an essential part of the project; you might like to consider storage areas, old garages, unused offices, old shops and service buildings. You can also use containers put on site for the purpose.

Choosing a model We have detailed the three models for running a Repurpose-type intervention on page 29.

We think the major driver for the model is the size of the estate. A fully-staffed model on a tiny estate is going to struggle to find enough furniture to process or customers for that furniture.

However, estate size is only one of the factors that will influence this decision. You might want to explore whether there is any interest or easy funding available for a programme of this kind. Also reexamine whether this model is even suitable for your estate. For example, what type and size of spaces are available to use? What are the real key drivers for a programme on your estate? Is it about learning skills? Providing volunteering opportunities? Estate activity? Furniture provision?

Waste prevention? Resident engagement? If it’s only about the first two you might be able to run a different kind of project that supports those needs. Only go down the re-use service route if there is a clear driver for it, as it can be costly and complicated!

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Setting up a regular service (like Models A or B) will take a lot of time and energy to drive forward.

We don’t think it can be run by volunteers alone due to the time commitment and volume of work involved and health and safety considerations. So where staff resources or budgets are limited you might want to think about starting small, and then aiming to scale up to a larger programme at a later date if feasible.

The flowchart above is designed to help you think through your options and decide which model would be most appropriate for your estate.

Monitor your impact You need to think at the beginning about how you might monitor your programme so you can see how well you are doing and prove it is successful. See Section 6: How to monitor and evaluate re-use projects.

Getting other teams in your organisation on board •

You will probably need the support of the other teams in your organisation who will be able to help you successfully deliver your project. This could include providing some of the information needed to start off the project, supplying resources to set up or run the hub, assisting with monitoring its impact or disseminating information to key stakeholders.

•

A re-use hub can offer major benefits. But your colleagues are likely to have a number of competing priorities, and this may not be on their agenda. This makes it really important to highlight the clear environmental, social and economic benefits of the project to demonstrate why it should be given priority – tailoring this to each team based on their interests and objectives.

•

Before talking to your colleagues, gather as much background information as you can on the estate, why a re-use project would be beneficial, and what’s already being done in the area of re-use (or at least waste management and sustainability).

•

Use the key statistics you’ve gathered to discuss with your colleagues how this project can help address issues on the estate – whether it’s fly-tipping rates, social isolation or unemployment. The kind of arguments that are likely to be powerful are: creates social cohesion and positive on-estate activity; minimises waste; improves recycling rates; provides residents with essential household furniture and appliances; generates employment and volunteer opportunities. However, you’ll need to adapt this to each team you’re talking to as different arguments will resonate with different teams. See the case studies we have put together on the different estates we have worked with and the benefits the programme has brought to each in Appendix 4, which could help you make your case.

The map in Appendix 5 shows some of the key teams within a housing provider organisation who may need to be engaged.

A plan of action 

Once you have key partners on board, you need a clear plan of action. Draw up an agreement that sets out each partner’s role and responsibilities, and timeframes for key activities. The figure below gives an overview of the key stages and an indication of their timings, which could be used to develop a more detailed action plan which you can see an example of in the Appendix 5.

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

Plan regular progress meetings and reports, to ensure that your progress towards objectives is tracked. Monitoring your progress this way will help you to secure future funding, make the case for subsidy, and win support to set up elsewhere.

Planning and stakeholder engagement

Planning

Recruitment

permission

Refurb and hub set-up

7 MONTH TIMESCALE

Set up shop Choosing premises •

Ensure you have suitable premises to work in before the project starts. Negotiating this at a later date can be time consuming and may not work: space cannot be created out of nowhere.

•

Ideally you want a space to be provided free of charge.

•

Many estates have underground garages or undercrofts that are often unused, however these may require planning permission (see later section on this).

•

Smaller services can be run out of smaller spaces, and even just a storage lock-up garage if you are running a Type C service on a small estate.

•

If you want to set up a Type A full-service programme you will need a single premises, big enough for all functions (we think at least 180m2).

•

The premises will need to accommodate the following: o o o o o o o o

Storage Workshop (for repairing and upcycling items) Retail Office set up IT, internet, phone Toilet, running water Kitchen Access for a van for wider collections and deliveries

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

You will need to have enough storage space to do the following: o o o

•

Store items that have been collected Store items that are being worked on Store/display items for sale in the future

Retail space needs to be able to display at least one set of each room’s furniture: o o o o

Bedroom Dining room Living room White goods/kitchen

•

It is strongly recommended to have a clear retail space available in the same location as the other activities; otherwise manpower needs to be split across multiple locations which will cause complications. Without retail space, retail can only come from pop-up shops which will place a limit on the amount of sales possible and the income generating capacity of the project.

•

Outside space can be useful for carrying out high fume activities (such as varnishing) and displaying products in the summer months. o

•

Visibility of the premises, and especially the workshop, is essential as it will raise awareness among the community and help to encourage volunteering. o

•

However, it is important to consider the noise, dust and fumes that this may generate, and the impact of this on residents – where possible, try to use a space away from residents’ properties.

For example, at The Loop @ Grahame Park, the workshop has a large glass window to a street with high footfall, making it highly visible to passers-by.

The layout of the space needs to allow easy flow of items between the various areas (for example, storage, workshop and retail space) and give visibility to residents. See below for a case study of the successful layout used at Grahame Park.

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Case Study: The Loop @ Grahame Park

Grahame Park site proposed floorplan and mobile storage unit design

Grahame Park site pre refurb and in construction

Grahame Park site launch

Planning permission •

If you are changing the use of a space, or carrying out refurbishments, you may need to get planning permission from the local council before you can start.

•

In the UK the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 1987 (as amended) puts uses of land and buildings into various categories known as 'Use Classes'. The suitable use classes for a re-use hub are A1 Shop or B1 Light Industrial.

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•

In general you will need planning permission to change from one use class to another, although there are exceptions where the legislation does allow some changes between uses.

If you are proposing to change the use of a premises you should always seek advice from the local planning authority to confirm whether planning permission is required or not.

•

Preparing a planning permission application can take a lot of time and you will need detailed drawings of your proposed plans, as well as a Design and Access Statement that shows how the plans fit in with the local area.

•

Each application in the UK will cost £350, plus around £120 to access suitable OS maps to show the location of the hub.

•

Planning applications will take a minimum of 8 weeks (and can take considerably longer), so you will need to include this in your timescale for planning the project. For example, Groundwork London started to apply for planning permission for the White City re-use hub in March 2016 and seven months later still had no answer.

•

All residents deemed to be affected by the application will be written to by the relevant council. To help secure buy in, it is worth writing to the residents yourselves to explain the proposals, as well as holding a consultation event for residents and other key stakeholders in advance of the decision.

Case study: Planning permission application for The Loop @ Pembury See our online Appendix 5 at: www.repurpose.london/pages/repurposeresources

Fitting out premises •

Establish the budget you have available for the premises early on. Even fitting out a shop will cost in the region of £10,000 and refurbishing other unused spaces that haven’t been used for a similar purpose could cost over £50,000. Example refurbishment plans from the Repurpose project are provided in Appendix 5.

•

Try to get reclaimed materials and equipment where possible: old office or education buildings that are shutting down may allow you to take their old cabinets and tables for free, or builders’ merchants may be able provide some materials for low cost or free. Paint can be sourced from paint recycling projects (such as the Forest Recycling Project, www.frponline.org.uk).

•

However, don’t make assumptions about what others will provide; ensure that you can provide the fit-out yourselves as budgets may get reallocated.

•

The space you have will determine what you can do, and therefore to some extent what equipment is needed.

•

Where possible, use volunteers (for example, local people or corporate volunteers) to help clean-out, fit-out, paint and carry out other tasks to get the space ready.

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Equipment •

Buy high/industrial quality versions of high-use items such as drills, steam cleaners and trolleys/sack barrows. Getting domestic level items is a false economy as they will require replacing. Ensure that all items are insured properly.

•

Explore whether there is sponsorship available for tools from local businesses, or second hand items that they might provide for free.

•

Ensure you have enough small containers for storing usable items for re-use later on, i.e. screws, handles or brackets. These are also useful for mixing paints and for temporary storage. You may well not need to buy these – take-away containers and jam jars work well.

•

Collecting and moving items can be difficult, especially across large estates. Consider buying a second-hand van, or investigating the option to use a van owned by another team in your organisation or a partner organisation. Golf buggies may also be an option that is likely to be lower cost than a van.

Starter Toolkit Flat-bed trolley and sack truck, ratchet straps and tarpaulin PAT tester and steam cleaner Safety equipment: sharps box, goggles, gloves, safety boots, hi-viz vests Cash box First aid kits Tools: electric drills, sanders, screwdriver, claw hammer, rubber mallet, pincers, pliers, tape measure, utility knife, spanner sets, masking tape, cloth tape, PVA, dust sheets, builders buckets Upcycling equipment: brushes, paint, varnish, scrap cloth, upholstery pins Cleaning materials Total cost approx. £4,000 if bought new

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Staff, volunteers and systems Recruiting staff: •

Don’t recruit staff until you have the location sorted as this process can take time and staff may not have much work to do during the interim period.

•

Recruit staff via environmental jobs sites, message boards (such as Project Dirt in the UK) and via local routes to try and engage local residents.

•

Recruiting local residents as staff can have benefits and pitfalls. Residents will know the estate well and may have existing useful connections. However they may also have existing negative associations and if for some reason the position doesn’t work out that could cause problems later on.

•

A two-stage interview process whereby the second stage has a practical element can be useful to establish if potential staff have the necessary leadership and practical skills, and are capable of working on their own.

•

To make a hub work, you ideally need two people in the retail space at any one time, plus two people going on collections and deliveries, and two people in the workshop. This avoids lone working or having to shut up the shop every time any activities are taking place outside the hub. Late working should just take place when there are evening workshops and events for residents, not part of regular day to day service delivery.

•

It is therefore recommended that a full-time service on an estate of 800 household units or more will require: o o o o o

1 x Full-time Workshop Manager 1 x Full-time Retail Manager 1 x Part-time Assistant 1 x Part-time Community Engagement Officer, and 3 to 4 regular volunteers a day.

•

Ideally 2-3 volunteers over the course of a week are needed to help with retail and admin, and the same number again to help with the workshop. Duties around events, activities and training can be delivered with the above team.

•

It is also important to achieve a balance in the rota of volunteers and assistants to ensure a mix of people who work well together and independently, and those who need additional/constant support.

•

If working across multiple estates, it may also be valuable to recruit an Operations Manager to oversee all the re-use hubs - interconnectedness is critical! If thinking of delivering the reuse programme across multiple estates you may like to think of a hub and spoke model, whereby you deliver furniture from multiple estates to a hub on one estate. However it is worth noting that the majority of the social benefits of the programme will only be apparent on the estate on which the full service is operating. We have only operated full models on each of our pilot estates to date so do not know the full drawbacks/benefits.

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•

These roles encompass a broad skills set and it is essential to get the right person for the job for the success of the project. For example, it is critical that staff have sufficient physical fitness to spend a large proportion of each day moving heavy furniture items. Multi-tasking also needs to be built into the job descriptions of both assistants and volunteers.

•

Ideally, staff should have a full, clean driving licence to enable them to drive a van during item collection and delivery.

Role descriptions for key staff, based on the Repurpose project, are provided in Appendix 6.

Staff training: •

Staff will need to be trained in the following skills: o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

PAT testing Manual carrying and lifting Database management First aid Fire Marshall Upcycling & upholstery Equalities & diversity Customer care Health and safety Sharps Conflict resolution Community engagement Project management Line management Dealing with vulnerable adults Coaching skills for line managers

Recruiting volunteers: •

Taking on volunteers is a key impact of the programme and will be highly beneficial both for the project and for the volunteers themselves. For the hub, it means extra pairs of hands to help out in a wide range of activities. For the volunteers, it means learning new skills, meeting new people and building confidence – it can even be a direct route of progression to employment.

•

Whilst producing your own advertising (leaflets, posters) may bring in a few volunteers, intermediaries can be more effective (such as TimeBank, local volunteering services or estate services); these intermediaries help by filtering potential volunteers for you and making the process of approaching the project less intimidating for them.

•

Taking part in/running events is a good way to find appropriate volunteers as these events provide an opportunity for you to interact with residents. There may also be local volunteer fairs that you can hold a stall at.

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Case Study: Doug (previously a volunteer, now employed 1 day/week at The Loop @ Grahame Park) “I had labouring experience and studied furniture making. I’d been volunteering here for 4 months, volunteering about 3 days/week, then the [Re-use Assistant] job became available and I applied for that [and am now working 1 day/week]. I still volunteer on the other days. I like being here because I do furniture making anyway, so I enjoy working with wood and cobbling stuff together.

It’s a nice crowd of people. I get on with everyone. I’ve had mental health issues - that’s why I am on ESA [Employment and Support Allowance]. Everyone here has something going on, either physical or mental health problems. I like that, I feel at home. There is no pressure if I’m having a bad day. In a lot of other work places you wouldn’t be able to be so open about it. It is very accommodating. It’s not only about recycling furniture, it’s also about people’s empowerment – to help volunteers’ lives improve, and like me move on to employment. For me the furniture is secondary, I think the social side is the most important thing. Helping other people is also very important- via furnishing their homes, reusing items is all a good thing to do.

I haven’t been involved in other regular volunteering work in the past, but lots of one-off things. I’m on benefits now which has reduced the pressure of income generation. However, from a confidence perspective going through the interview process and getting the position was important. It’s great I got it. Being here I was supported in getting the job; that made such a difference. So it was a low stress experience which is what you need if you’re feeling a bit vulnerable. It was a brilliant way of getting back into the job market which can potentially be very stressful, but all that stress was taken off me. It was fantastic. I’m lacking confidence big time. It makes me think ‘I’m not bothered’, but I do need that kind confirmation. I’m now a success story.”

•

You do not need to wait until the hub is fully set up to involve volunteers. Volunteers like to feel ownership of a space and involving them in the set-up phase is a good way to achieve this. They can also help out with tasks that require many hands (such as painting, demolishing, or building worktables).

•

It is better to start new volunteers gradually rather than getting multiple new volunteers to start at once; each volunteer will need time to settle in and too much upheaval can be overwhelming, especially if the volunteers are high-needs (see below).

•

Allow time for volunteer induction sessions – they may need to be trained in specific skills, and will also just need some time to familiarise themselves with the hub.

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•

Expect many of the volunteers to be high-needs (such as those with mental and physical health problems, substance abusers, or the elderly) as these people will generally be more available, and have free time during the day. However this does not mean they will be low skilled. Repurpose has attracted many highly-skilled individuals who have left the labour market but have really useful skills for the project (such as carpenters, painter/decorators, multi-skilled tradesmen, and those who know many residents).

•

It may be beneficial to take on volunteers from both on and off the estate. However, be aware that they may have pre-existing relationships with other estate residents; these could be positive or negative.

•

The demographics of the estate are likely to influence the type of volunteers you receive.

Case Study: Bez (volunteer at The Loop @ Grahame Park) “I had a nervous breakdown 6 years ago and I couldn’t leave my house. When I started to get better I started coming here and it has changed me so much: eight months ago I wouldn’t be able to speak to you as I couldn’t focus at all and I would have been too intimidated.

I have been volunteering here for eight months, and was the first volunteer on the project. In the beginning it was very scary for me to even be around other people and I felt lost, so being involved in the start of the project worked really well as it wasn’t too busy. Slowly slowly, I started working with Jodie [previous Re-use Coordinator] which gave me a lot of confidence. The work at the beginning was painting and I am a painter/decorator by trade, so I already had many of the skills required. So that for me was perfect.

The timing of opening of the shop was perfect. I was slowly building up confidence and then I started getting to know everybody. I come here whenever I can, whenever I feel well enough. This work for me is like a meditation. It makes me feel good that I am doing something for the community. And it is no pressure. Although I am using my skills I feel that if I was in a paid position now I wouldn’t be able to cope with the pressure.

I am giving everything I have to The Loop. I can’t see that I could do any other type of volunteering.

The Loop for me was like a Godsend - I live just next door. It feels like the opportunity was sent to fit me perfectly. I will never be able to give back what I have got out of volunteering here already.”

Maintaining volunteers: •

Volunteers are an essential part of the project delivery and need to be treated as such.

•

Take time to find out what new volunteers are interested in, plus assess their existing skill level, to help work out what tasks to assign them. Giving them a variety of tasks keeps things interesting and also helps to broaden their skills and experience.

•

Volunteers will need managing on a day to day basis. They work best with a clear structure and routine, with allocated times when they are expected to be in. In Repurpose, most volunteers have adhered to these times and have been reliable (if their health condition

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doesn’t prevent them attending), as they feel an essential part of the team. You may even get volunteers that are very keen and turn up on additional days; this needs to be managed sensitively. As volunteers get used to the set up and space they should need less supervision.

•

Create an on-going jobs list that volunteers can pick jobs from if you are too busy to allocate further work.

•

Create designated days for volunteers that require extra support (such as those with mental and physical health problems) so that you can dedicate sufficient time to helping them on those days. If possible set up some kind of support/counselling service to support the management of high-needs volunteers.

•

You will need to manage the compatibility/dynamics between volunteers, especially if they are high-needs. The workshop needs to be a calm space that volunteers are happy to spend time in and look forward to visiting. Where there are conflicts, this may require scheduling to ensure certain volunteers are not working at the same time.

•

High-needs volunteers may gain confidence as they get used to the space and be willing to expand the tasks they do. Therefore take time to regularly re-assess their confidence and interests.

Volunteer-run programmes: In Repurpose, there was only one estate on which volunteers were interested or capable in taking over some of the more managerial aspects of the programme. This is partly due to the nature of the volunteering. Volunteering hours are mostly in the day time, which lends itself to out of work mothers whose children are in childcare or at school, retired people, or those temporarily out of work or long-term unemployed (many of whom are high-needs). This is also partly because a service of this kind is by its nature extremely demanding and time consuming.

Those volunteers that seem interested in taking on aspects of the programme need to be supported to think through the logistics of doing so.

Setting up systems and processes: •

Before you start you will need to ensure you have adequate insurance to cover liability for staff and volunteers and the activities you will be undertaking. You will need to carry out a risk assessment and evaluation of other Health and Safety issues such as fire. o o o

•

Sound proofing, electrical installation, plumbing and ventilation requirements When carrying out refurbishment works, appoint a competent Principal Designer and Principal Contractor, and comply with CDM Regulations 2015 Comply with planning permission conditions and building control requirements

Establish clear health and safety rules that all volunteers and staff must sign up to and adhere to. o

This should include: weekly health and safety tests and recording; monthly health and safety premises inspection (such as fire and smoke detectors and water temperature/Legionella)

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•

Risk Assessments and other annual and 6-monthly health and safety requirements should be coordinated with corporate health and safety teams, in line with your organisation's health and safety policies and relevant legislation. o

o o o o o o

You will also need to set up a Waste Management Plan (see example provided for the Loop @ Pembury in Appendix 7) and COSSH procedures for some of the products you will need to use, such as varnish, which can be considered toxic.

PAT testing will be required for all electrical items and staff will need to be trained in PAT testing You will need to set up processes for the collection and delivery of items, the recording of money and the management of staff time.

A simple online calendar, visible by all staff, can be used to schedule collections and deliveries. An online calendar can also help to manage staff absences.

A simple form to be filled in on point of collection allows receipt of an item to be recorded and acknowledged. Examples of this is provided in Appendix 7.

A simple receipt book can be filled in to acknowledge payment for an item.

Examples of this are provided in Appendix 7.

Money spent and received can be input to a simple petty cash spreadsheet, to be used alongside the receipt book.

•

An online database can be used to record items received and sold. To make this work easily each item will need to be marked with a unique number.

•

Where possible, it would be better to have a bespoke fit for purpose system (EPOS: Electronic Point of Sale) that means all data can be input once, rather than requiring handwritten receipts and keeping numerous duplicate versions of financial and monitoring data.

Connecting this directly with the organisation’s other finance systems and databases will help to streamline this process

•

A paper book that captures key information is an easy system for use in the hub during the day. o o

•

However, with an EPOS system this is not necessary – only if there are issues with Internet connections and database accessibility Consider the most appropriate ways to collect payments – for example, modern payment options such as contactless or online payments can be beneficial but require setting up. Cash-handling may be straightforward but requires security systems for storing and banking.

To ensure the project is embedded and provide opportunities to learn, exchange ideas and network, it may be beneficial to set up or join a local network of partners or similar organisations, as well as being a part of a wider network of re-use hubs across the city or country.

Engaging with your organisation’s processes: Whilst you can make every effort to make a programme like this work, ultimately you will probably need to engage with your organisation’s policies to really support it longer term. For example, looking at the job descriptions of caretakers, key KPIs that waste teams work towards and your overall waste policy to consider whether it is set up to support re-use. For more information on how to do that please see our Policy Pack online at www.repurpose.london/pages/repurposeresources.

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Running the hub Running the workshop: •

Don’t allow volunteers to bring their own tools in as this can lead to confusion and volunteers’ tools won’t be insured.

•

Ensure that tools all have a designated place to be returned to, so that the workshop can be easily organised at the end of a session by both volunteers and staff.

Repairs and upcycling: •

The first, and most desirable, solution to dealing with furniture items is to just clean, polish and then put the item for sale, as this is the quickest and cheapest option in terms of turnaround time. Ideally items should be put for sale immediately if there is space in the retail display area.

Flowchart for furniture assessment

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•

Only if an item requires obvious fixing or is unsaleable in its current condition should time be spent repairing/painting/upcycling it. There may be price limits on certain estates that you will not be able to go above even if a lot of time has been invested in an item. Equally, whilst the upcycling may be done by a volunteer it is still taking up space in the workshop and time that could be spent on another task.

•

If an item doesn’t sell or secure any interest within 4 weeks then it should be changed to make it more desirable. o

Desirability depends on the demographics and taste of the residents. It may involve making the item more neutral or more interesting. It is worth testing with the local market what tastes are. Running events, such as decoupage workshops, might introduce a new style or taste to an area as customers will have buy-in to the final product.

Pricing: •

You will need to test your proposed sale prices on your market. Use the Furniture Re-use Network’s (FRN, www.frn.org.uk) suggested price list as a guideline and then explore what customers would be willing to pay. See below for a sample price list from the Grahame Park estate.

•

Price up each item so that the price is clear.

•

It is important to price items correctly - ensuring prices are kept affordable for low income families, but also that there is the potential to sell at higher prices to non-local residents/non-low income customers. For example, this could be done by having a set (higher) price on display, and then upon evidence of being a local resident on low income, the customer gets an agreed discount. o o

At locations nearer high streets and serving a wider population it may be appropriate to have higher prices than at those servicing low income estates only Higher value items can also be sold elsewhere and online.

•

Customers may try to bargain, particularly if coming from a culture where bargaining is the norm. You may therefore need to build a buffer of £5 or so into the price of items. An EPOS system is likely to make it much easier to have set prices that are kept to.

•

Periodically hold advertised sales to get rid of old stock at a discount (25-50%). Old stock can make the shop seem less dynamic.

•

Ensure that any deposit schemes are clearly explained and publicised. The Repurpose project uses a scheme whereby a deposit of at least 10% of the item’s value is taken and the item is reserved until the customer pays in full. The maximum period of time the item is reserved for will need to be agreed; depending on the storage space available this can be within 1-2 weeks. Once this time has expired if the customer hasn’t paid, contact them and if they no longer want the item it can be re-sold.

•

For pop-up shops (see below) all items must be paid in full up-front due to the short-term nature of these shops.

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Grahame Park average pricelist

Retail and display: •

Change the retail display every week so that it entices customers to come in and see what new items are in stock.

•

Ensure the display is attractive. Laying it out like the rooms in a home (kitchen, living room, bedroom) makes the items more easily accessible to residents. Take a look at IKEA for inspiration!

•

Have clear opening hours that are communicated to residents. These will need to include the time during the school run when there might be a rush. If the hub needs to be shut for any unexpected reason put a note on the door explaining why to residents. o

Bear in mind that it may only be possible to have set opening hours if you have a full team of staff, supported by volunteers – without this, it is likely the hub will need to close for collections and deliveries

•

Saturday opening provides an opportunity for working residents to access the shop.

•

You will need at least one afternoon per week to do internal admin (such as reading and responding to emails, organising paperwork), tidy up and rearrange items, so book this in as a closed time from the start. The experience of the Repurpose project has been that it can sometimes take half a day just to rearrange items – so staff need to bear this in mind when planning their time.

Collections and deliveries: •

These are physically demanding and time consuming. Each collection might take up to 45 minutes if no disassembling is required. In Repurpose, some collections (especially on larger estates) have taken up to 2 hours!

•

Many customers will contact the hub when they are on the verge of disposing an item, and will require the item to be collected immediately. However, it is always worth asking if they would be available at an alternative time to try to group collections together on particular days so that sufficient help can be sought.

•

You will need to offer early or late collections to allow for the working day.

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•

Before collecting items assess over the phone the condition and number of items and undertake an initial screening to see whether the items are suitable and may need disassembly. Arrange a viewing if you are unsure of an item’s suitability (for example, you will need to check for fire safety labels on upholstered furniture).

•

Make clear rules about what you can and can’t take, for example no sofas from upper floors of blocks with no lifts for safety reasons.

•

Offer delivery of sold items for a set fee (in the Repurpose project this is set at £10 per item anywhere on the estate). For bulky items almost all customers will need delivery.

Alternatively if you use a small trolley for deliveries and collections this could be loaned to customers for a deposit so that they can carry the items themselves.

•

When collecting or delivering items, always be aware that you are entering someone’s home. Be polite and courteous, and ensure the necessary lone working procedures are in place and adhered to. You may want to consider getting DBS checks (criminal record checks) for staff.

Example collection and delivery forms are provided in Appendix 7.

Pop-up shops: 

These can be used if no retail area is available, to promote the hub to other areas of the estate, and to create an opportunity to engage with residents. However, they are probably only necessary if there isn’t a good retail space at the hub itself, due to the effort required to set a pop-up shop up.



In the Repurpose project, pop-up shops have been found to be good for raising awareness and engaging with people, but tend not to earn as much in sales as more permanent retail spaces.



Based on the experiences of Repurpose, you can anticipate selling up to 8 items from a popup shop. However, its success will be weather and holiday dependent: certain months (January/August) are naturally going to be quieter, whereas other summer months will be busier.

•

Permission should be sought from the Estate Manager before running pop-up shops on the estate. Trading licences might be needed for areas outside estates.

•

These take 3 people to run; this allows for transportation of items and looking after them while in situ.

•

They should be run at a regular time so that residents know when they are on. o

o

•

Good timings for a pop-up shop are during school run time on a weekday or on an afternoon at weekends. Running it as part of an existing community event on the estate will also help to attract residents and other passers-by.

Holding the pop-up shop on weekdays near community facilities will enable key partners and funders to see them in action (at weekends it is likely that partner organisation staff won’t be around).

They should be sited on a busy thoroughfare where maximum numbers of people are likely to pass.

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•

A gazebo (to keep items dry), signage to alert people to the shop and show who is running it, and a display on the project will be needed. It is also a useful time to hand out marketing materials, promote upcoming events and volunteering opportunities. Example promotional materials are provided in Appendix 2.

•

New stock is needed for each shop.

•

Items need to be easily moveable. Bigger items can be photographed rather than moved to the pop-up shop site.

Keep it going •

Re-use businesses typically take up to 3.5 years to break even. So if you are looking at setting up a Type A service you may need to look to diverse funding partners to support you through the first few years of operation.

•

You will also need to keep people informed about progress to make sure that you can capitalise on existing support.

•

Lastly you will need to regularly review what you are doing, to make sure that you are on the right track and if not to explore alternative pathways.

Generating your own revenue •

In a Type A model you can look to generate on average £2,000 basic income per month. In the second year, we anticipate this could get up to £4,500 per month per site by the end of the year, with full staff and activities and a diversification of income (see below).

•

Even with this projected income increase, you would still need a subsidy of approximately £2,000 per month.

Expanding your income You may want to explore other income generating activities, such as: •

Getting first refusal on voids (empty properties) removals, or on items no longer wanted by leaseholders or new estate residents

•

Taking part in the local council’s voucher schemes where vouchers are provided to in-need residents to be used to purchase furniture

•

Renting out workshop space for local entrepreneurs

•

Running paid for courses (such as upholstery courses) for able-to-pay residents

•

Offering paid-for services such as steam cleaning, flat pack assembly, putting up shelves, furniture repairs, upholstery, or making garden furniture out of pallets

•

Taking commissions to repair or alter items that residents want to keep themselves

•

Selling high value items off the estate via online sales platforms or partnerships with other sales outlets.

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Further funding •

There are a few charitable funds suitable for re-use projects. However, you will probably want to widen your search further to include those that support employment and volunteering schemes, learning skills, community cohesion and social support, all of which the programme will address. One issue that you might find is that many funds for small projects of this kind set limits on the size of organisation that can apply. You could partner with a local organisation to help to address this.

•

You could also explore corporate sponsorship, from local or national partners.

•

Think about the wide range of benefits you are delivering when applying for funding. This is not just a story of furniture, so don’t just search for grant funders that support furniture reuse.

•

To deliver our pilot, we received funds from Big Lottery Fund Awards for All, Tesco’s Bags of Help, Southwark’s Cleaner Greener Safer Fund, the People’s Postcode Lottery, Paddy Power and Jewson.

Keeping people informed •

Keep partners and local residents informed about progress regularly, using the monitoring systems you have set up. This will make sure there are no surprises and learning about your success is likely to encourage people to support more.

•

For residents you can keep a simple blackboard outside your site showing some of your key impact numbers, and use social media and your website to do the same.

•

For key partners you will probably want to put together quarterly reports showing your key figures and case studies to bring what you are doing to life.

Reviewing your progress •

Set up regular review points and review how you are doing against your original targets.

•

You might want to ask yourself whether your model is still valid for your estate or if it’s better to go down another route. We have based our advice on just five estates, but your estate will have individual characteristics that you might need to take into account. At the very least this will show you how well you are doing and encourage you to keep going!

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MONITORING 59

6. How to monitor and evaluate re-use projects Technical monitoring This seeks to capture the technical data obtained during the project. Through this, it is possible to monitor how effective the project is at meeting its collection and sales targets, and whether it is having an impact on fly-tipping quantities.

In Repurpose, three key objectives have been monitored across all 5 estates: Requirements

What

How

Re-use tonnage

Monthly reports showing type and number of items re-used and for each: initial route to hub, upcycling process if any, end location and cost associated

Generated through the re-use database

Fly-tipping tonnage Baseline survey of fly-tipping volume and items

Regular samples of fly-tipping volume

Paper survey carried out and inputted into re-use database

Paper survey carried out at intervals (e.g. 5 weekly) and inputted into re-use database

Quarterly KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) Developed following the against which to monitor progress baseline surveys on each estate Skills and employability outcomes

Quarterly reports on number of active volunteers

Fed into quarterly progress update

Skills/training courses undertaken by volunteers

Fed into quarterly progress update

Routes into employment provided

Quarterly report to the Principal Project Manager

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Key stages in the technical monitoring process include baseline monitoring, database set-up and regular monitoring of progress.

Baseline monitoring: at the beginning of the project, the amount of items fly-tipped on each estate over a two-week period was recorded, and the percentage of the waste items that was re-usable was assessed visually. We use FRN figures to calculate the CO2 savings of items collected and average weight of items.

In addition, an ‘Estate Mapper’ activity was undertaken with residents on each estate, which aimed to identify fly-tipping hot spots and gather residents’ opinions on fly-tipping and re-use potential.

Residents toured the estate looking at fly-tipping hotspots and taking photos, as well as recording how each fly-tipping area made them feel.

Residents recorded their answers to questions such as: •

Is the amount of fly-tipped waste at this location typical of an average week?

•

Do you think the amount of fly-tipping/ waste at this location has changed over the last year?

•

Are the items at this location reusable?

•

How do you feel about these items being thrown away?

For the results of the Repurpose Estate Mapper activity and guidance on how to carry out a similar exercise, see Appendix 3.

Andover estate mapper

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Database set-up: A live database was created on Zoho Creator (www.zoho.com/creator), so that all items collected, stored, upcycled, mended, sold and delivered could be monitored and recorded in real-time.

The database is accessible online from each of the five project locations. It provides each item collected with a unique reference number so that its path can be recorded from source to final destination. The furniture category, work required and number of residents engaged are all recorded. The database utilises the Furniture Re-use Network’s standard average weights and CO2 savings.

A simple Google database or Excel spreadsheet could provide a similar function. This is what we used until the number of items collected meant the database became very slow. An example is provided in Appendix 8.

Another way to monitor is by collecting anecdotal evidence from residents. For example, on collection you can ask various monitoring questions such as ‘What would you have done with this item if you hadn’t donated it to the re-use hub?’.

Another item to monitor is volunteer hours, i.e. how long they have spent on the project and what activities they carried out.

Regular monitoring: Following baseline monitoring database set-up, fly-tipping monitoring was completed on a five-weekly basis on all estates, with data inputted so that emerging trends could be monitored and progress against targets (in this case a 25% reduction in incidents of fly-tipping) assessed. A number of automatic reports were set up from the database. As a result, real-time data on the performance of the project is available and service delivery progress could be assessed on a daily basis, making it possible to respond to emerging trends. Data has been downloaded and analysed every month to review progress against sales, collections and tonnage targets.

In depth analysis of the monitoring data can show what percentage of fly-tipped items could potentially be re-used. This gives a more accurate estimate as to the percentage reduction in flytipping that could be achieved and can be useful for future funding applications.

Advice for technical monitoring: •

Involve estate caretakers in baseline and progress monitoring where possible – allowing for the fact they may need training first.

•

Run caretaker workshops to give training on how to identify re-usable items and undertake fly-tipping monitoring.

•

It may be necessary to develop your own monitoring system if an existing system is not available – this can be beneficial as it allows you to adapt it to project requirements. For an example fly-tipping survey monitoring form that could be used, see Appendix 8.

•

To show the impact of your work you will need to monitor the impact you are having.

However, trying to count the fly-tipped items on the estate and see if you are able to reduce the total number is likely to be ineffective as the numbers will fluctuate depending on the time of year and there is still an overall upwards trend in fly-tipping nationally. This type of monitoring may be possible on a very small estate where all the items are collected together, however on a large estate with multiple collection points it will be hard.

•

To understand the true impact on fly-tipping, monitoring needs to be reviewed against the general trend for increases in fly-tipping year on year, as well as an analysis of the potential re-usable items in the fly-tipping on each estate.

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•

If you do want to monitor absolute volume of bulky waste items it would be better to see if the bulky waste teams weigh the items coming from the estate in isolation and use those figures.

Behaviour change monitoring Through behaviour change monitoring it is possible to assess the impact of project activities in terms of residents’ perceptions and individual and collective behaviours with regard to re-use, recycling and waste. In the Repurpose project, this has included carrying out monitoring of residents’ attitudes via before and after surveys.

Face-to-face surveys have made it possible to engage verbally with residents and inform them of the project – doing this at the start provides a baseline to monitor impact against and to measure the level and direction of behaviour change taking place on each estate. It has also helped to inform the development of community engagement activities to develop a shared set of values and positive practical responses to environmental challenges.

The initial survey used in the Repurpose project covered the following areas; fly-tipping and feelings around fly-tipping, current behaviours and actions on dealing with unwanted goods, thoughts on a re-use service on the estate, and knowledge and use of existing waste services.

A second in-depth survey was conducted with residents to assess four factors; attitudes to recycling/re-use, views on the convenience of recycling/re-use, social pressure to recycle/re-use and how familiar residents were with recycling options.

In addition, a post-event questionnaire was developed, for using at behaviour change events. Other monitoring tools (such as post-it note boards, pledge trees, voting slips and recording of verbal feedback) were also developed for use when a detailed questionnaire was not possible.

An analysis report for both surveys was produced by the project’s academic partner (Middlesex University) using a specialist statistical package (SPSS Statistics), which was used to test assumptions between key variables and test for differences and trends across the interventions. In summary the in-depth survey found that those ‘who consider future outcomes’ are more likely to have a positive attitude to recycling and related activities. 86% of residents who were asked said they would buy items from a re-use hub. See Appendix 8 for suggested survey questions based on the Repurpose project surveys.

Advice for behaviour change monitoring: •

Adapt surveys to suit different audiences where possible – for example, language shouldn’t be overly complicated or academic.

•

Letting residents know about surveys in advance may help to engage them, for example putting leaflets through doors, putting posters on notice boards or attending resident meetings and community events.

•

Plan ahead and ensure sufficient resources to cover estates in full – it can take some time to do doorstep surveys on large estates, so community events may also provide a good opportunity to speak to multiple residents.

•

Consider the best time of day to do surveys – residents may be out at work or on the school run, which may require repeat visits of homes.

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•

Explore the potential for residents (‘community champions’) to be trained in doing the surveys – this can bring additional knowledge and skills to the survey process and also offer employment opportunities to these individuals.

•

Surveys rely on self-reported behaviours and are therefore subject to potential over- or under-reporting and other inaccuracies; using different questions for measuring behaviour, including offering choices derived from standardised measures will help to make the data as robust as possible.

•

Gathering feedback from events can be challenging, especially if of a drop-in nature as it can be difficult to catch people as they are leaving. It often requires a dedicated staff member, which may not be feasible. Attendees may also be reluctant to participate if the activity is seen to be too formal (e.g. sign in sheets and feedback forms). In the absence of detailed feedback, a simple headcount can still be useful, alongside simple anonymous approaches such as post-it boards and voting slips.

Other monitoring Training evaluation If a training programme is being run as part of the project, evaluation of this can include quantitative feedback on: modules developed and delivered; number of housing/waste sector practitioners engaged; number of social housing residents engaged; number of unemployed housing residents engaged.

It can also include qualitative feedback on the effectiveness of training, for example in the Repurpose project feedback was gathered from Resident Ambassador training events via a bespoke feedback form.

Resident engagement evaluation This helps to determine the impact of activities and events delivered. It can be done in several ways, including the number of: events and activities delivered; households reached; residents engaged; schools engaged.

Qualitative feedback from events and other activities can help to explore: impact/enjoyment of event, skills learned, as well as knowledge about waste, re-use and fly-tipping and of the re-use hub service. This can be gathered through feedback forms, comments boards, bespoke questionnaires and conversations with residents.

Where applicable, qualitative and quantitative feedback on volunteer engagement can cover: champions appointed, activities undertaken, and training undertaken.

Risks monitoring Setting up a risk register can help to identify, address and monitor risks across the project. This is likely to be particularly critical during the initial stages of setting up re-use services and hubs, but can apply to all project activities from project mobilisation, initial engagement and planning, through to delivery and planning for sustainability.

There may also be external risks that could affect the success of the project, such as a shift in the policy environment or lack of interest from housing providers. Legislative or regulatory constraints also need to be considered, including health and safety and waste duty of care legislation.

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USEFUL LINKS 65

7. Further sources of information London •

Repurpose project: project website, providing information on the 5 Loops, news and resources (www.repurpose.london)

•

Groundwork London: environmental regeneration charity, working to help communities find practical solutions to the challenges they face (www.groundwork.org.uk/london)

•

London Community Resource Network (LCRN): a charity pioneering community solutions to London’s waste challenge (www.lcrn.org.uk)

•

London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB): a statutory Board established by the GLA Act 2007 to provide a strategic approach to waste management in London (www.lwarb.gov.uk)

•

Resource London: a newly created partnership programme formed by LWARB and WRAP, supporting London boroughs to deliver more consistent and efficient waste and recycling services for London (www.resourcelondon.org)

•

Recycle For London: a source of information about recycling, re-use and repair in London (www.recycleforlondon.com)

•

WRAP: the government’s resource efficiency body, helping businesses, local authorities and individuals reduce waste, develop sustainable products and use resources in an efficient way (www.wrap.org.uk)

•

Furniture Re-use Network (FRN): the national body which supports, assists and develops charitable re-use organisations across the UK (www.frn.org.uk)

•

Chartered Institution of Wastes Management: UK institution for resources and waste management (www.ciwm.co.uk)

•

Recycle Now: a source of information about recycling, re-use and repair in the UK (www.recyclenow.com)

UK

Europe •

RREUSE: represents social enterprises active in re-use, repair and recycling across Europe (www.rreuse.org)

•

ACR+: the association of cities and regions for recycling and sustainable resource management, with an international network of members (www.acrplus.org)

•

Zero Waste Europe: a knowledge network and advocacy group which aims to empower communities to rethink their relationship with resources (www.zerowasteeurope.eu)

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•

Circular Europe Network: an initiative on circular economy planning by cities and regions, established by ACR+ (www.circular-europe-network.eu)

•

European Environmental Bureau: the environmental voice of European citizens, including on waste; manages the Make Resources Count website, campaigning for less waste and better product design that lowers Europe’s resource consumption (www.makeresourcescount.eu)

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APPENDICES 68

8. Appendices All appendices are available online at www.repurpose.london/pages/repurposeresources 1. Resident engagement 1.1 Repurpose resident engagement plans 1.2 Events and activities – Repurpose case studies and suggestions 1.3 Schools programmes suggestions 2. Promotional materials 2.1 Repurpose example promotional materials 3. Site mapping and layouts 3.1 Repurpose estate mapper photos 3.2 Repurpose estate and area profiles and maps 3.3 Guidance on creating estate profiles and maps 4. Repurpose case studies 4.1 Volunteers 4.2 Partners 4.3 Customers 5. Planning the project 5.1 Map of key housing organisation teams to engage 5.2 Action Plan example 5.3 Repurpose planning application example - Pembury estate 5.4 Repurpose site refurbishment plans 6. Role descriptions 6.1 Retail and Enterprise Manager and Co-ordinator 6.2 Estate Re-use Assistant 6.3 Workshop Manager 6.4 Workshop Assistant 6.5 Retail and Enterprise Assistant 7. Systems and processes 7.1 Repurpose Waste Management Plan example – Pembury estate 7.2 Repurpose cash receipt books, delivery and collection forms 8. Monitoring 8.1 Item monitoring database example 8.2 Fly-tipping survey monitoring form 8.3 Behaviour change survey suggested questions

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 70

9. Acknowledgements Thank you to all those who have contributed to the development of this guide.

The local partners who supported us to set up services across London, including: The Loop @ Pembury Estate in Hackney in partnership with Peabody The Loop @ Grahame Park Estate in Barnet in partnership with Genesis Housing and Barnet Housing The Loop @ White City Estate in Hammersmith & Fulham in partnership with Hammersmith & Fulham Council The Loop @ Samuel Lewis Trust Estate in Southwark in partnership with Southern Housing Group The Loop @ Andover Estate in Islington in partnership with Islington Council Our steering group members, including: Richard Featherstone, London Community Resource Network Tom Dickens, Middlesex University Anthony Buchan, London Waste and Recycling Board Andrew Richmond, Greater London Authority Patrick Mahon, Waste and Resources Action Programme Sharon Ross, Western Riverside Waste Authority Barbara Herridge, North London Waste Authority Josie Warden, RSA Sarah Mellor, Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority Michelle Lynch, Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority Sharon Schaaf, Hammersmith & Fulham Council Peter Bull, Hammersmith & Fulham Council Tessa Barraclough, Peabody Daniel Navarro, Peabody Rachael Mills, Southern Housing Group Will Routh, Southern Housing Group Sarah Connelly, Genesis Housing Association Jacqueline Robinson, Islington Council Jo Murphy, Islington Council For more information about the Repurpose project or Groundwork London’s expertise in this area, please contact: Hannah Baker, Programme Manager: hannah.baker@groundwork.org.uk Graham Parry, Director Youth, Employment & Skills: graham.parry@groundwork.org.uk Groundwork London is a company limited by guarantee and registered in England. Registered Office: 18-21 Morley Street, London, SE1 7QZ Company Registration No: 04212532 Charity Registration No: 1121105

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