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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