From antique clocks to laptops, our WARPit enthusiasts share their best tips!

As part of our commitment to reducing waste and consumption of materials, UCL partnered with Warpit in 2011. Warpit is a tool all UCL staff can use to share furniture, stationary and equipment needing a new home. It helps staff save money, reduce UCL’s carbon and brings back life into some of the perfectly usable and sometimes interesting antiques- otherwise going to the recycling centre. UCL has currently saved 150060kg of C02 and £350,030 from using WARPit!

Alex Jones, our new Sustainability Procurement Officer has been on the hunt to find out about WARPit and how it has helped some of our departments. This month he spoke to Sui Jing Ly, a dedicated Library assistant for the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital, to find out how WARPit has helped the Library. ICH have been using WARPit for 4 years.

What do you give away on WARPit? Usually we offer large filling cabinets. The cabinets gain a lot of interest. As the library moves materials over to digital format we have had a lot of filling cabinets that were surplus to requirements. As they are big items, they are very hard to get rid of ourselves. Also I have offered ring binder materials and stationary on occasion too.

Why is WARPit good? WARPit is great as it takes the legwork out of removing the cabinets ourselves and it finds the cabinets a new home. When we go to throw something out I suggest WARPit first – “How do you know, let’s try”.

Any tips? It is worth uploading an item 3-4 times as often on the 4th occasion a taker is found. Particularly in the summer, when a lot of UCL is not open an item might be missed.

Another tip is to have a word document with all the items details, descriptions and dimensions.  You can then upload the items in one go by pasting the information from the master document. It also makes relisting the item easier as the information is there.  When the item is claimed I will put the date next to the item so it isn’t relisted again.

What do you claim? Before buying stationary I look on WARPit first. I got loads of staples for the library. I’ve got enough to last until I retire!

See how WARPit can aid your own department or project by going on UCL’s WARPit page here.

Next month Alex will be talking about the Bloomsbury theatre refurbishment project and how our architects reused the materials no longer needed.