Two areas where housing can help limit waste

World Environment Day falls on 5 June and focuses on how organisations across the world can limit waste and facilitate a broader transition to a circular economy. Housing professionals are ideally placed to support their residents to be more sustainable at home, and we’ve decided to mark World Environment Day by looking at two pieces of the broader puzzle – furniture and water.

Furniture reuse schemes

A couple of weeks ago, End Furniture Poverty revealed that 26 per cent of all social housing tenants are living in furniture poverty, compared to nine per cent of all UK residents. For millions, the cost of furniture and essential white goods is simply out of reach, and increasingly so – the cost of furniture, furnishings and carpet has increased by 44 per cent since 2010. End Furniture Poverty have documented the devastating impact this can have, especially for people experiencing homelessness and women fleeing domestic violence.

Circular or reuse schemes can be a vital way for social landlords to offer decent items of furniture to residents at very low costs, or often for free. As End Furniture Poverty have noted, several landlords have set up schemes to collect, refurbish, and redistribute old or damaged furniture to residents. Some of the ways you can do this are:

• Set up a furniture upcycling scheme, like the one operated by Thirteen Group. Their scheme refurbishes old and used furniture, and gifts it to residents on lower incomes or those who have few possessions of their own when moving into a new home.
• Think about what is left behind when a home becomes void, and how you can reuse it. For example, Stockport Homes Group collect furniture from voids and other homes across Stockport, not just the ones that they manage, and pass it through to their residents.
• See how you can benefit from getting involved in the Reuse Network, which could support you and your residents to divert household items otherwise destined for landfill into new homes.
• Help your residents to find places where they can access items they need for less – this guide by Your Housing Group might be a handy place to begin.

While taking steps to recycle and reuse furniture shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for providing good furnished tenancies, it can help you move towards that goal. What’s more, recycling furniture and other goods can have a huge environmental impact – in 2022, the reuse sector reused 2.7 million furniture and electrical items, saving 98,935 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

Down the plughole

Beyond furniture, you can take steps to recycle and reduce waste in other areas. On average, every person in the UK uses 145 litres of water every day. In fact, most of the mundane, everyday things we do at home involve using water, like using a dishwasher (14 litres) and flushing the toilet (five litres).

Small changes can go a long way to achieving this, and some of the things you can do are:

• Produce a guide for your residents, helping them with how they can use water efficiently in the home. For instance, Hexagon Housing Association have produced a handy guide for their residents, explaining how things like turning the tap off when brushing your teeth could add up to savings on water and energy bills. Waterwise also have a helpful page which you could adapt into a primer for residents.
• Look at installing water saving devices in your homes, like kitchen tap aerators or regulated shower timers.
• Think about options to reduce water run-off or reduce water pressure. For example, Nottingham Community Housing Association have committed to reducing water pressure at inlet valves, and are examining how fitting water quality filters could reduce central heating costs.

Reducing water waste is not just a matter of saving the environment, it’s a matter of saving money too. Water is expensive, with bills continuing to rise, and an astonishing 109 litres per home are lost each day through leakage. Helping residents to be more water efficient could save them money on their energy bills and, if they have a water meter, their water bills too.

Waste not want not

Furniture and water are just two of the areas where we need to move to a more circular and efficient economy of use. There are many more – energy, food, and waste, to name but three. But if nothing else, World Environment Day is a good opportunity to pause and think through how we can be more efficient, both for our organisations, our residents, and of course ourselves too.