Talk Bronx New York

NYC Store Saves Home Supplies From Trash & Resells Them 

Brand-new porcelain toilets, some still in their boxes, stood on a pallet in the warehouse. Nearby was a pile of unused ceramic tiles. And stacked against the walls of the building were about 200 doors.

This was not the inventory of a Home Depot, a Lowes or some other big home improvement store, but of ReBuilders Source, a building materials re-use store in the Bronx.

The store sells building materials donated by demolition or construction contractors, home renovators and other hardware stores with surplus inventory. The main goal project is to offer an alternative to the landfill for building supplies that normally might get thrown into the trash.

Workers at the store have spent months creating a donor network, making cold calls and researching on the Internet. Once they know that building materials are being tossed out, they will arrange to send a truck to pick them up. Much of what they sell, at discounts between 25 and 50 percent, has never been used.

The store, which celebrates its grand opening on Monday, is the first project of Green Worker Cooperatives, an organization with the goal of creating environmentally friendly jobs and businesses in the poor neighborhood.

“We didn’t want to wait for people outside the community to decide what kind of jobs we would have in the community,” said Omar Freilla, who leads the cooperative and helped launch the store in the Hunts Point section.

The idea of re-use is not new, but it is gaining recognition around the country as people embrace the idea of green building.

There are more than 1,000 building material re-use stores in the country, according to the Pittsburgh-based Building Materials Reuse Association.

An estimate by the BMRA in 2005 found that re-use stores sell an estimated 315,000 to 360,000 tons of building materials each year, a tiny fraction of total waste from building activities.

“There’s an awful lot more room to grow,” said BMRA President Brad Guy.

In New York, thousands of tons of construction and demolition debris are thrown away each year. But there are only a handful of stores that sell salvaged building materials.

Build It Green! NYC, a nonprofit store in Queens, sold about 350 tons of building materials in 2007, according to Justin Green, the program director. It made $900 per ton, he said.

“It’s not a massive takeout,” Green said. “But New York City could support maybe 20 more of these stores because we do create so much waste.”

In the Bronx, waste is an acute community concern: The borough handles more than 8,000 tons of the approximately 45,000 tons of waste generated daily by the city, according to the Department of Sanitation. Much of that is handled in the South Bronx.

Residents in the neighborhood have long been concerned about the effects on air quality and public health of nearly two dozen waste transfer stations in the neighborhood, especially the fume-exhaling trucks that serve them. The neighborhood has one of the highest rates of asthma in the city.

The Department of Sanitation said that the amount of trash being transported for handling in the Bronx has gone down over the past 20 years, because of increased regulation. Most garbage exported to out-of-state landfills is by rail, cutting down on truck traffic, said Thomas Milora, executive assistant to the sanitation commissioner. Read more..

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Greening the Bronx, One Castoff at a Time

 

Omar Freilla, center, started a cooperative to recycle building supplies with, from left, Julie Falu Garcia, Yasin York, Gloria Walker and Carlos Angel.

 Carlos Angel, left, of ReBuilders Source solicits construction materials at an Upper West Side building under renovation.

No one would mistake Timpson Place in the South Bronx for the cradle of a new environmental movement. This short street wedged between Bruckner and Southern Boulevards and East 149th Street is lined with small homes and a couple of brick warehouses. The largest tree — or, more accurately, what remains of it — is a Beetle-size hunk of roots and trunk that was yanked out of a construction site and dumped onto the sidewalk.

Give Omar Freilla a chance, and he might find a use for that trunk. Inside a green-and-white warehouse on Timpson Place, he has been helping a small crew of urban recyclers arrange rows of doors, stacks of tiles, pallets of gravel and gallons of paint as they prepare for Monday’s official opening of ReBuilders Source, where used and overstocked building supplies will be sold at deep discounts. He believes it is the nation’s first worker-owned cooperative for reused building materials.

“The stuff you see here, if you look at it for what it is, is a toilet or a cabinet, it’s not garbage,” he said. “If you put it in a Dumpster, then it becomes waste. Context is everything. All we’re doing is changing the context.”

He intends to do the same for his neighborhood, Hunts Point, which for decades has held the dubious honor of being the city’s dumping ground. Wastewater treatment plants, smelly sludge processing facilities and riverside scrap yards outnumber parks. Mr. Freilla figured that if he could get people to see the value in things others tossed away, he might also change how they look at the out-of-the-way neighborhood, too. Read more..

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