WARP IT (Waste Action Re-use Portal) is an online platform that allows organisations to find, give away or loan office equipment and furniture both within and externally to the organisation.  The platform aims to make it easier for staff to find colleagues with items to spare, or to find new owners for furniture or equipment that is no longer needed. NHS Trusts in England have signed up to the portal, data made available for 13 of these and a further 7 in Scotland was used to calculate typical cost savings resulting from using the portal. Data from a case study for a Scottish NHS organisation was used to extrapolate carbon savings for NHS England.

Case study sources

WARP-It Case Study for NHS Tayside

Underlying data for NHS Tayside and other NHS Trusts signed up was provided by WARP-IT

Financial Calculations

Savings

The average monthly financial saving according to the data provided by WARP-IT was calculated across the 20 NHS Trusts and scaled according to the floor area. This gave an average saving of £1422 per month for a trust of average floor area. To give an annual financial saving, this was rounded to £17,000.

Cost

The costs used were based on those advertised by WARP-IT, given as £150 per month plus VAT and assuming that additional meetings, which incur a cost, would be required. An annual figure of £3000 per trust was estimated.

Carbon Calculations

Carbon savings were based on those reported on the WARP-IT portal for a Scottish NHS since carbon figures weren’t included for the wider data set. Normalised for floor area, an annual value of 7000 tonnes CO₂ for the average trust was used.

Assumptions

In scaling up the intervention to the national level, it has been assumed that similar services would be applicable to most organisations, and that floor area is the most appropriate means of scaling