Pass it on

26 February, 2010

The opening of the new North Leamington School (NLS), Warwickshire, in September 2009 fulfilled a long-held vision to create an inspiring context for 21st-century learning on a single site.

For years the school had struggled to deliver courses in outdated and inadequate buildings inconveniently located across three sites. ‘We are a specialist performance arts school,’ points out headteacher David Hazeldine, ‘but we didn’t have a performance space.’

Designed like a university campus, with separate buildings for each faculty linked to a central hub, the £32m new school incorporates a mass of environmentally friendly features and a range of enviable facilities, including a theatre, dance studio and music rooms.

Harrow Green, already the approved commercial relocation partner for Warwickshire County Council, was engaged to plan the relocation of essential furniture, lab equipment, the gym, the music department, books, files, stationery and teaching materials.

It was not a simple task. Throughout the project provision had to be made for safe working during school hours, scheduling the move around breaks and lunch periods. A flexible timetable was needed to accommodate both access to the old school for packing, and the readiness of the new school to accept deliveries. The situation was further complicated by the impact of the recession during the building programme, leading to the layoff of a substantial proportion of the construction team working on the site.

Under those circumstances, and given the inherent complexity and scale of the move, Rick Brown, assistant head and project manager for the new school, maintains that it was Harrow Green’s ‘calm and measured approach that gave me the confidence that the project could be achieved’.

The move from three sites to the new building, which formed Harrow Green’s initial brief, quickly developed into a major recycling project. With the installation of completely new furniture and equipment, ergonomically designed and complementary to the building interiors, much of the old furniture inevitably became redundant. The whole ethos of the NLS design project was to be as ‘green’ as possible within the budget – and that meant thinking carefully about the environmental impact of what turned out to be a major clearance exercise.

The old sixth-form college was housed in a listed Victorian building that, while architecturally impressive, was no longer fit for purpose. Over the years, its warren of unused rooms had become a storehouse (but by no means a treasure house) of forgotten articles. In fact, says Dave Russell, Harrow Green’s contract manager on the project, ‘the crew renamed the school Hogwarts. Not just because of its gothic architecture, but because you could go up a staircase on one floor, come down the opposite staircase and yet find yourself on a completely different floor.’

Green disposal
Harrow Green has a well-established corporate approach to disposal, at the heart of which lies a cooperative working relationship with the client to discover the best options for recycling. The priority is to find a home for redundant furniture and equipment, either through resale or by working with a distribution partner.

Some of the surplus furniture from NLS was resold to Chasetown Specialist Sports College in Staffordshire. The bulk of the reusable furniture – four articulated truckloads – went to Green-Works, the social enterprise organisation that provides low-cost sources of furniture to businesses, charities, community groups and schools in the developing world.

Much of the furniture removed from the school was shipped to classrooms in Sierra Leone, a country devastated by years of civil war and desperate to provide basic facilities in its schools – not only for children, but for teachers too, who, without tables and chairs, often teach for 12 hours at a time on their feet. Some also went to St Kitts in the Caribbean to help establish a nursery attached to a nurse training centre. That has meant that trainee nurses from St Kitts and other islands now have somewhere to leave their children during their training programme, widening opportunities for nursing in the Caribbean.

As the curriculum changes new textbooks and sets of books may no longer have a use and end up in cupboards and storerooms. Harrow Green collated various collections from around the buildings for recycling. Books no longer relevant but never discarded were collected by Choice Textiles (primarily a textile and clothing recycling company) as part of their Book Savers project, ensuring usable books and textbooks reach schools in developing countries to supplement scarce teaching resources. Book Savers is one of a growing number of initiatives to recycle books from schools, colleges and public libraries in the UK for reuse overseas.

Unsuitable furniture was broken up for recycling. Metalwork stripped from the furniture was processed locally using a specialist metal recycling company, A&M Metals, which provided onsite roll-on, rolloff skips. All the wood and melamine-faced chipboard (some 33 tonnes) went to A&A Recycling, one of Harrow Green’s accredited recycling partners in the Midlands, who chip it and recycle it for a variety of purposes, including new MDF and chipboard sheets, animal bedding, landscaping and fuel for biomass boilers.

With buildings standing empty, there was always going to be a marginal risk of break-in and vandalism. So every last scrap of waste material had to be cleared. Paper and other material was separated into skips for responsible recycling, to complete not only an effective move but a maximum recycling and reuse project.

The new school concept was designed to be ‘ecologically rich’ from the beginning, with decisions early on to maximise natural light, use organic materials (sedum) for the roof, aim for a high level of thermal efficiency, and commit to a locally sourced biomass boiler, all of which contributed to the school’s BREEAM Excellent rating.

‘It was natural,’ concludes Dave Russell, ‘that we should aim for and achieve a maximum recycling and reuse project, diverting in total around 100 tonnes of material from landfill to better use’.