THE SHEDZONE STORY
From the earliest times at BWRP, we had long contemplated how best to recycle the marginal material mainly collected from construction sites. I.e Its not highly valuable in the shop and it’s too good to be sent to Avonmouth for chipping. For a long time this marginal wood was turned into firewood and kindling in a process that was highly seasonal, was uninspiring for our volunteers and was also, ultimately, damaging to our beloved Bristol air.The solution was “Shedzone” which is a section within the organisation that specialises in low tech upcycling of this marginal material primarily focused on producing storage for recycling boxes and wheelie bins or indeed a range of garden storage requirements like bike stores and potting tables. The Shedzone workshop follows 3 principles:
MODULAR DESIGN
We have a modular design system that means we create a small number of standardised “lego brick” components and from that we produce a wide range of finished products. These are standardised products for sure but with a lot of options for you to choose from Whether it be the highly desirable “living roof", the ‘fun to build’ barn doors or ‘take it home and build yourself’ flat pack version. So many options and configurations in fact that we think we could build over 150 units and still not build the same unit twice.
VOLUNTEER LED
The products are almost entirely produced by BWRP volunteers who have the opportunity to learn the basic skills of woodworking, to see the fruits of their labour in a day and to experience the end to end nature of BWRP recycling. They might be collecting from the streets of Bristol in the morning and assembling a unit from that very wood in the afternoon.
