Recipro are always interested in the reuse and reselling of material both construction and domestic, so last night’s Apprentice episode was definitely up our street. For those of you who don’t watch it or missed last night’s episode; Lord Sugar set both teams the task of setting up a second hand shop in London’s fashionable East End, their first task was to source reusable and second hand materials to sell in their stores.

As a connoisseur of the reuse sector Recipro knows that the most important thing in regards to sourcing and obtaining materials is thinking of who would buy it; for Recipro it’s all about bricks, timber, plaster board and general building materials as we have a lot of community projects and construction colleges who require those kind of building materials.

Laura’s team, Sterling, had a different idea which was to upcycle every item they had purchased.  Upcycling is a great way to create new uses for products, but with limited time and money it didn’t seem like the most appropriate idea.  With Gabrielle painting union jacks over everything in sight as well as ordering enough fabric to reupholster a furniture store their spending soared out of control. Someone also had the bright idea to scatter dead leaves across the store to give the store an edgy look, sadly that failed!

Tom, team leader of Phoenix, was a little pickier with his selection of items with a very minimalistic look to his teams shop. The first day he trusted his sales team with a mere £200 to source the materials to fill his shop and due to that by day 2 they were running out of items to sell in their shop. Tom sent his buying team on one last dash to buy, buy, buy and it’s clearly not good to shop in a rush as one shop owner who the team purchased a variety of items from claimed they had “rummaged through a pile of junk and ended up with 2 old metal chairs which to be truthful aren’t even worth their money in scrap”. The sentiment wasn’t shared by Sales Manager, Stephen Brady who claimed to have “taken all the best stuff”.

In the boardroom it was on a knife edge with Lord Sugar having a few harsh words to say to both teams. It was Tom’s penny pinching that was the victor over Laura’s extravagant spending with Team Phoenix announcing profits of £1063 and Laura’s team, Sterling limping in with £783. It had been team Sterling’s over buying which had cost them as they had purchased 200 items to sell whereas Team Phoenix who sourced more responsibly had purchased just 50 items!

Laura decided that the failure of the task was down to Gabrielle’s designs and over spending on materials coupled with Jane’s sales figures which stood at just £10! There were certainly grounds to sack them all but luckily for Gabrielle she had the best sales with over £400 of materials sold. Laura was fortunate this was her first time in the board room so was given a second chance. The axe fell on Jane who had been on the losing team 3 out of the last 4 tasks and her sales record in this particular task was certainly the final nail in her coffin.

So with 12 people left the sweep stake in the Recipro office is certainly heating up; I’m quietly confident that either Ricky or Tom could help me to victory but who do you think will win?