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B&Q repairs returns for sustainability and profit

David Gregory-KumarWest Midlands science, environment, and rural affairs correspondent
News imageBBC A woman with long brown hair, long sleeves and gloves looking at a piece of electronic equipment with keys and a display screen on a black worktop in a room with blue shelves behind the deskBBC
Thousands of items have been restored over the last 18 months at the Staffordshire warehouse

Every year online shoppers return more than £25bn of goods to retailers.

And you might imagine that much of that is just repackaged and put back on sale.

But that is not the case.

For fashion only about half of clothing returned is resold and some of the rest can be sent straight to landfill.

But in a Staffordshire warehouse a well known DIY retailer is trying a new approach to its online returns.

For the past 18 months B&Q has been giving returned products to a team of engineers who do their best to refurbish them before they are resold.

Some can come back pristine, some not so much.

"Other items you can see they've been heavily used and there's not a lot left of it," engineer and all round repair-guy Mikolaj Kolmer explained.

"But we do out best to get them to a working condition, safe, and then suitable for sale after that."

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Mikolaj Kolmer said the team did their best to repair the items, but some were badly damaged

Wandering up and down the work benches in the busy warehouse, everything from power tools to air conditioners to vacuum cleaners can be seen being checked over and worked on.

Even if a product is past saving it can still be stripped for parts and used for future repairs.

It is all very environmental, but for B&Q this new approach does make financial sense too. Repaired items go back up for sale on its website at a discount.

Head of sustainabilty Samantha Dyer explained the scheme was expanding over the next year from 200 products to 400.

"So now we have a way to sell them back to customers at a great retail price, that we know is more affordable to them, but also give us more profit."

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Samantha Dyer said consumers and retailers both benefited from the recycling

This is a good example of what environmentalists call the circular economy.

If you tip the scales in favour of repair and refurbishment you can keep product out of landfill and boost your top line.

In fact the government sees this as something that could be good for the country's economy and it has a circular economy strategy - which appears to have been delayed, as it was expected to be published by now.

News imageA woman with tied back brown hair and a pink reflective jacket in a blurred room
Emily Carr said the policy was good for the economy

Emily Carr from think tank Green Alliance still expects the strategy to appear very soon

She said: "The government has called this the circular economy growth plan, and that's because these kind of interventions are really positive for growth.

"It can improve the resilience of this economy."

This team of engineers in a warehouse by the M6 are showing other companies what the future of online returns could look like.

Keeping unwanted products out of landfill and boosting profits.

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