Rally 'round re-use: the universal 'green'
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There's a strange and wonderful place where big corporations and lone do-it-yourselfers, liberals and conservatives, city-dwellers and suburbanites, rich and poor can come together -- and do -- perhaps without ever realizing it: the aisles of a re-use-it center.
Thursday I would have written "the" re-use-it center -- Thursday being the day the Post-Gazette featured Construction Junction's role in salvaging building materials and furnishings from the vacant Downtown stores that PNC Financial Services Group will soon demolish to make way for its newest skyscraper.
But on Friday I found out Pittsburgh now has a second nonprofit that sells recycled and surplus building materials and household items. It's Habitat for Humanity's "ReStore ," located in the former Busy Beaver site at Edgewood Towne Centre.
As great as this news is for Pittsburgh, it's going to worry my husband. We're nearing the end of renovations in our 100-year-old home -- a former shoe polish factory on the North Side -- so my foraging is mostly recreational. I look at architectural debris and used furniture and wonder, What could I turn that into?
Like I need another unfinished project lying about the house ...
Re-use is the second verb in the mantra, "Reduce, re-use, recycle." I insist on the hyphen: "Reuse" looks French, not English. And putting an umlaut over the "u," à la The New Yorker, is just too precious.
We're Americans, by golly, and whatever our income, political orientation or punctuation peccadilloes, we are finding that the new, new thing is one our Depression-baby parents learned the hard way: Don't throw it away -- find another use for it, or let someone else.
If "living green" is an old virtue, Pittsburghers are taking to its modern retail version with growing enthusiasm.
"Most major cities the size of Pittsburgh and larger support more than one operation like this," said Mike Gable, Construction Junction's founding director. "Overall, it's a good thing that there are more options" for consumers.
The two nonprofits -- CJ and Habitat -- worked cooperatively together for years, but Habitat launched its own retail effort last June, and their respective stores are somewhat different.
ReStore has more upholstered pieces, household goods and furniture, while CJ offers more architectural salvage from jobs like the PNC project. "We're a cross between Goodwill and Home Depot," said ReStore manager Glenn Bertha.
Both stores rely on donated goods, of course, but ReStore also relies on donated manpower: All staffers are volunteers, and large groups from area businesses and churches are especially welcome for big jobs, Mr. Bertha said.
"Some donated products we have to go through literally piece by piece. We just received electrical components -- 40 pallets of brand-new product -- from a wholesale distributor. Light fixtures, junction boxes, outlet boxes ... so, groups are wonderful!"
With no budget for advertising, ReStore is relying on word of mouth. Open just six months, "we're getting a lot of foot traffic," Mr. Bertha said, with 225 customers or so on a weekday, more on Saturdays.
Leaders of Pittsburgh's pioneering re-use center remember their start-up: On its opening day in November 1999, Mr. Gable said, Construction Junction rang up five sales for a total of $186.
"In 2011, we averaged 117 purchases for about $3,700 in sales per day -- a total of $1.3 million last year."
That's a lot of stuff that isn't in a landfill.
But this isn't just fine sentiment. It's good business. PNC's " green demolition " of the Public Safety Building in 2004 for a park alongside its new -- and "green" -- Firstside Center actually cost less than a conventional demolition because they made so much from the sale of recyclable materials (everything from ceiling tiles to aluminum window frames).
As great as it is to see a big corporation making the effort, I'm the beneficiary of one small business's more modest -- but priceless -- decision.
For the past decade, Construction Junction has been our go-to place for the genuine old doors, newel posts and balusters our home lacked. One surviving original feature we loved was our front room's tin ceiling, but several squares were rusted through and randomly crumbled onto our heads, thanks to long-ago leaks. I researched reproduction tin ceilings, but our pattern was not available anywhere.
One day I wandered through Construction Junction and found a big garbage can filled with tin ceiling remnants that were an exact match to mine. They were all that had been salvaged from a burned-out bar. I bought the barrel on the spot.
We got just enough good pieces to replace our crumbling ones. Painted aqua with pearl glaze, the ceiling's now a jaw-dropper. It never would have happened without someone deciding that saving bits of the past is worthwhile.
First Published January 23, 2012 12:00 am
