Technology

The rise of reuse

In spite of being overlooked for many years by waste legislation in the UK, reuse seems to be experiencing somewhat of a boom of late. Henry Widdicombe and Libby Peake explore the relationship between government policy and the population’s new-found passion for reuse

The catchy mantra describing the waste hierarchy has always been “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”, but not all aspects of the chant receive equal official attention. Reuse, in particular, has a case for feeling a little hard done by. It reduces the pressure on virgin resources and requires little to no energy to carry out, but successive government waste strategies have paid lip service to its importance whilst lacking teeth when it came to providing local authorities with deliverable targets or giving people incentives to reuse.

And to some extent, this is understandable: reuse often takes place on an informal basis (families handing down clothes or passing on televisions, for example) or through Internet sites or third-sector organisations (one look at any high street will tell you there are countless charity shops out there). Consequently, reuse is extremely hard to quantify according to Daniel Dipper, who works for Defra on Sustainable Consumption and Production & Waste: “Reuse is something that’s very difficult to measure…we have no figures on eBay.”

Moreover, the volume of waste that can be reused is much smaller than that which can be recycled and consequently, there’s a tendency on the part of government to focus on the larger proportion of landfilled items that can be treated by recycling, even though it comes behind reuse in the waste hierarchy. Dipper explains: “At the moment, a lot of the information we’re giving to local authorities is on recycling because in terms of tonnages, which is our main target due to the European Landfill Directive, our goal is to reduce the amount that are going to landfill and also on improving our recycling rates.”

However, according to Dipper, the Waste Strategy still identifies reuse as the “most effective way of dealing with the majority of waste”. And recently, government took some steps to encourage it, as Paul Smith, chief executive of the Furniture Reuse Network (FRN), explains: “The most concrete thing that Defra has done and which we would applaud is to write in reuse this year into the local government performance indicators, It used to be that if you did reuse, it counted against your recycling target. Because if something was reused that could have been recycled, you lost the recycling tonnage…The other area where reuse has been written into government strategy is in the WEEE Directive, where it says that the option for reuse [for used electronic devices] should always be considered first.”

There’s still room for improvement, however, as although councils can count reused items (collected by them or on their behalf by third-sector groups) in their indicator sets, there are no concrete targets to ensure the reusable waste items councils collect actually are reused. According to Smith, “The government should encourage local authorities to look at reuse targets in terms of their bulky waste stream. We calculate that local authorities destroy and dispose of (either by burying or burning) about 10 million items of reusable furniture a year.” Additionally, “although reuse is written into the WEEE Directive, the high value of scrap means that a large number of reusable items are not reused because the organisations that have got the goods would rather get the scrap value. So, we think there should be more work to set a target for reuse in the WEEE Directive and actually enforce the regulations.”

Furthermore, given that reuse is not normally carried out through government bodies, the most effective way to increase its practice is surely by raising public awareness and not enough is currently being done on that front. For three years until 2008, Defra funded a successful Choose2Reuse campaign in Anglia, but has no current reuse initiatives to increase awareness. And WRAP, the organisation that Defra depends upon to disseminate information about recycling and food waste, does not deal explicitly with reuse, as Vikki Coppin, WRAP Press Officer, explains: “We’re working across the resource efficiency loop, which includes waste prevention, recycling and composting, processing and manufacturing options and smarter procurement – underpinning this is our new business plan for 2008-2011 where ‘reuse’ per se is not highlighted as one of our priority areas.” Defra recently took a step in the right direction by sponsoring the Centre for Remanufacturing and Reuse, which has the explicit aim of being “a recognised hub for advice and support in the area of remanufacturing and reuse (NOT recycling) for manufacturers, remanufacturers and purchasers”. The Centre recently launched a website (www.remanufacturing.org.uk) full of practical advice aimed at people involved in the industry about restoring for reuse everything from carpet tiles to defence equipment.

As far as the general public goes, however, reuse, is still often left to the third sector and, recently, to market forces. Whether because of the credit crunch or because people are becoming more environmentally aware in general, reuse is on the rise. This upsurge is easily illustrated by the online phenomenon, Freecycle; whereby local volunteers in 4,558 locations throughout the world manage online forums for people to offer unwanted items for free to anyone willing to come and collect them. Kathryn Hollingsworth from Freecycle UK describes what happened in this country: “The first group started in October 2003 in London and it took a year to reach 500 UK members, but since then growth has been exponential and current membership stands at 1.36 million members organised in 480 local groups.”

With Freecycle moving from a niche tool used by the environmentally aware to a massive worldwide phenomenon, the need to measure what this means in terms of actual environmental impacts, such as tonnes diverted from landfill and CO2 savings, has increased. Neil Morris, the UK Director of Freecycle, says: “The evidence seems to suggest that for 2,000,000 members you can expect to reuse some 221 tones per day. This suggests that in the UK 100 tonnes per working day are taken out of final disposal by Freecycle members”. That’s a conservative estimate of 25,000 tonnes a year of reusable items being diverted from the waste stream.

So, has this sudden rise in online reuse activity (in addition to Freecycle, sites like Gumtree and, of course eBay, provide the public with innumerable chances to reuse) stolen the market from the third sector, the traditional standard-bearer for the cause? Not so, says Caroline Lee Smith at FRN. According to Smith, Freecycle has had a lot of benefits, not least “making people think that they can get rid of stuff easily without having to dump it”. She also believes that there are plenty of reusable items to go around: “I think the market is huge, so Freecycle coming in and diverting however many tonnes is in addition to our members.”

Indeed, the opportunities to find new homes for old items are so numerous and the environmental benefits such behaviour provides are so great that government, third-sector groups, communities, individuals and the environment alike can only benefit from increases in public awareness and the proliferation of sustainable reuse organisations. The government’s recently launched third-sector capacity building programme aimed specifically at recycling and reuse organisations is certainly a step in the right direction, but the more that’s done to promote reuse, the better.