We recently bought some new lockers for our changing rooms so I am currently trying to find someone who wants our old lockers. I thought it would be easy – there are loads of second hand furniture places out there so how hard can it be? Surprisingly difficult actually! 

I found loads of companies who buy and sell second hand furniture, particularly office furniture, however most of them are only interested in buying second hand furniture in bulk. They do office clearances or buy old stock from warehouses, so they weren’t interested in a few beaten up old lockers!

So then I started to look at charities and local furniture recycling projects. London Furniture Recycling Project (LFRN) is a good place to start, as they have a list of most of the projects in the London area, which can be found here. Most of them specialise in furniture for the home because they pass the goods on to families on a low income, so lockers were of no use to them. Some of them do collect office furniture though. Green-works will refurbishes furniture before passing it on to groups or charities that can’t afford brand new stuff. However, they wanted to charge us £170 for collection of the lockers, which is a bit expensive if you ask me. A similar scheme called OFFERs was charging £50 for collection, which was more reasonable.

The only other options are to sell them on ebay, or to put them on Freecycle. If you haven’t heard of Freecycle before, it is a group that makes use of the philosophy that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. If you have something that you don’t want anymore but is still in reasonable condition, you can post a description of the item to the group and anyone who wants it can come and collect it. The only rules are that everything offered must be free. I checked with our Green Mark advisers that it’s OK for businesses to use Freecycle and they told me that it’s fine because anything that you put on Freecycle is not waste so is not covered by waste regulations.

We’re going to try Freecycle first. It’s our first time using the system so I’ll let you know how we get on…