Tuesday 1st October 2024
The first leg of the tour is New York. I’ve been wanting to come and find out more about their reuse culture ever since seeing a presentation at a RReuse conference in 2018 on the Donate NYC programme. It’s a city-led support and promotion programme, and I loved their public facing website detailing all of the reuse/share/repair/donate opportunities in the city as well as the events and communications. I liked that everything was in one place and I'd love to see similar in Scotland.
Today I met with Alissa Westervelt, Donations & Reuse operations lead at the Bureau of Recycling & Sustainability for the city of New York. She manages the Donate NYC programme. We talked about reuse in NYC and I shared our experiences from Scotland.
Unfortunately, The Donate NYC programme has been loosing resource and priority with a new administration (a lot has happened politically in the last week here alone and meant our meeting was held in a cafe rather than their offices and a reuse network meeting moved from Tuesday to today, Friday). As you’ll see from the website, it’s not being updated. They have spent a number of years building up the reuse network in the city (much like a Circular Communities Scotland membership) and while the website is still operational hosting resources and a map of all activity, they are now unable host events or promote the site.
Aside from the changes to the Donate NYC programme, we also spoke about the challenges to the sector, to mainstreaming reuse, and to getting buy in from policy makers. Many of the issues seem to be the same for NYC as it is for Scotland.
Takeaways
For the organisations, finding and keeping the right premises are big challenges. Alissa spoke of several people who have been moved or that can’t find the right/big enough space. It strikes me that ‘at scale’ in Manhattan is more about volume of second hand shops and reuse activity like swap events, rather than bigger locations.
Logistics and transportation are also an issue. Trying to make it easy for people to donate and purchase large items can be tricky if locations are inaccessible (even more so in Manhattan) and the people that need it most can’t travel.
Creating the case for ongoing support and investment is hard, and all it takes is one change in leadership to undo a lot of years progress and hard work.
The need for policy and legislation was underpinned. Here, thankfully, is where Scotland is ahead with our Circular Economy bill and other potential forthcoming policies. Without those built in, there is nothing to hang the case on to.
In NYC, a rule was passed in July 2024 "requiring Department of Citywide Administrative Services to donate surplus city-owned computers to eligible organizations for beneficial use" .With that, the market has certainty of product and support, and new reuse operations can be implemented and existing ones grow.
There are often shifting priorities and focusses depending on the administrations interests and other policies. Currently there is a focus on textiles and C&D (construction and demolition). More on textiles in a future post!
Gathering useful data from all is challenging. In fact, the state often takes the information/raw data from stores and then puts it through their own Reuse Impact Calculator. More on this in the final report.
There was agreement from both of us that the focus on green skills and workers suport is something to lean in to.
We also agreement on the need to showcase the wide range of other benefits that reuse brings beyond carbon. While carbon is relitively easy to showcase, it's the other beneftis that will bring that long term support and additional resources.
I asked whether she thought the sector was growing and whether consumer perceptions were shifting in a positive direction. While it's hard to tell as this data is not being tracked, there was a feeling that there was an increase in different types of reuse.
For example with more hybrid reuse locations appearing. This is where second hand is sold alongside new, and seems to be popping up in sportswear and sporting equipment shops. I think this is a great idea and can really normalise choosing second hand, especially with new audiences and those who normally go straight to buying new.
There is a lot of community swap/free activity too, such as the poster above and this one that I'm going to try get along to on Saturday. There's a post brewing on all of this kind of activity along with my upcoming post from meeting Wendy Brawer of Green Maps who spoke so passionately about the community leading the way especially in textiles and composting.
It's something for me to consider when I’m thinking about what is meant by ‘mainstreaming’ – it’s about accessibility afterall, so in some cases it might be about destination shopping, and in others it’s about frequency of opportunity (many second hand places in one location, or second hand options appearing right beside ‘normal’ retail).
Linked to that, another reflection for me was how much more work the reuse sector needs to do to understand retail behaviours and future trends. Revolve supports the sector with visual merchandising and retail tools, but if second hand is to become the norm, then we need to be playing the same game as new-product retail. Understanding how and why people will consume products in the future is key in disrupting and intervening with other, more sustainable options.
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