How LGIM unlocked the circular economy for tenants

LGIM Real Assets has partnered with ESG reuse marketplace Globechain to help its tenants trade and reuse unwanted items and materials.

Users can list items such as construction materials, office furniture, IT equipment or appliances on a marketplace that connects businesses that work at LGIM’s buildings. The goal is to stop these things being thrown away when they can still be useful somewhere else.

Speaking to PlaceTech, Mark Tyson, head of property operations for LGIM Real Assets, likened the Reuse Exchange network to eBay or Facebook Marketplace. People can choose to either sell or donate items they no longer need and create watchlists for items they do.

“Your waste can be valuable to me,” he explains. One example he gives is eggshells, which bakeries throw away on a daily basis, although they have a wide range of uses in industries like manufacturing, medicine and chemistry.

• ‘Enormous opportunity’ | Making the business case for circularity

The other benefit is that LGIM can not only get directly involved with waste management but also report on the carbon it has stopped going to the landfill.

The Reuse Exchange network is part of LGIM’s occupier engagement platform Vizta, which the company launched a year ago with startup ility in an effort to improve communication between the landlord and its tenants.

Since its launch, Vizta has been used on more than 3,500 live leases across 700 buildings by 396 businesses.

From local to national

Still in its early days, the reuse network functions on a local level, with businesses that share space on an industrial estate, for example, able to trade their unwanted items. But Tyson wants to see it enable reuse across the UK.

“Ultimately what we’re trying to build here is a national network where you can actually trade between Newcastle and Birmingham,” he says.

User interest for Vizta grew slowly at first, but Tyson said that it has picked up in the last few months, aided by campaigns around features like the Reuse Exchange. By the end of 2024, Tyson expects 2,000 active businesses to use the platform.

“What we’ve learned is it’s a bit like running a social media business in real estate, so we’ve got to work out how to engage people and how to pull them into the platform,” Tyson says. “And then, once they’re there, how do we give them a reason to come back and keep interacting with us?”

Up next: tackling wasted energy

Vizta was created to offer tenants access to asset and property management teams while making finance and sustainability data easily available.

The next step, expected in January, will be for Vizta to provide daily energy data across LGIM’s office, industrial and retail units. This will allow a brewery on an industrial estate, for example, to see that they have a surge in energy use every Tuesday, contact LGIM’s engineers and have the problem fixed.

By using Vizta, tenants will have access to both the data that will help them find areas to cut costs or carbon and the experts who can help them make those cuts.

Tyson says: “My view is that in terms of achieving our net zero carbon journey, that level of collaboration, that level of education, that level of visibility, will be a game changer for us.”

• REGISTER NOW | ESG: The Retrofit Playbook