Celebrating Earth Day with the Asheville Habitat ReStores

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With Earth Day just around the corner, it’s an ideal time to reflect on how the Asheville Habitat ReStores fit into not only our mission and community, but our responsibility to minimize our waste. Our ReStores play a crucial role in recirculating saleable goods within our community at affordable prices. Every item purchased at the ReStore—a gently used piece of furniture, a salvaged building material, or a pre-loved appliance—helps fund Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity’s Homeownership and Home Repair programs. This sustainable cycle not only supports families and individuals in need of safe, affordable housing, but also keeps material objects from the landfill while giving them a second chance at life. Read on to learn more about how we minimize our impact on the environment while maximizing our impact on our community.

Waste Diversion:

2,851 tons of waste diverted from landfills in 2023.

In 2023, the Asheville and Weaverville ReStores diverted 2,851 tons of waste from the landfill. If you’re wondering what that looks like, that’s the mass of roughly 1,400 passenger cars — or more cars than can fit on the Golden Gate Bridge at once! Through a steady stream of cabinets, appliances, furniture, housewares and, yes, even cars, donors in our community kept a veritable San Francisco traffic jam worth of material flowing through the ReStores last year. Gently loved couches that might have been tossed at the transfer station were instead re-homed to people in need of seating on a budget. Volunteers repaired large appliances that had given up the ghost, breathing new life into sturdy old machines with new parts. And excess glassware donated by local restaurants found itself back in style, rather than back in the bin. Though the sheer volume of usable goods kept out of the ground can be hard to conceptualize, the results are not: in 2023, proceeds from the sales of these items helped 16 qualified homebuyers purchase a home in partnership with Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity, and 56 homes in our community saw crucial repairs affordably completed with the help of our Home Repair team.

 

Fabric Recycling:

14,760 pounds of fabric recycled through Green Zone textile recycling in 2023.Back in early 2020, the ReStores found themselves in a (mostly positive) pickle: local animal rescue shelters that had been taking accumulated unsaleable fabrics and textiles from the stores could no longer accept them. The shelters, which had been using the fabrics for bedding and cleaning material, were so well supported that they no longer had any need for them. To continue keeping the unsaleable textiles out of the trash, Asheville Habitat connected with Green Zone Recycling. Green Zone, based out of Durham, NC, is the largest textile recycler in the southeast U.S. market, and they have been picking up fabric by the (increasingly large) bag from the Asheville ReStore every week since February of 2020. To date, the ReStores have recycled over 43,815 pounds of fabric through Green Zone, with 14,670 pounds recycled in 2023 alone!

 

Deconstruction:

82 Deconstruction jobs completed by ReStore staff and volunteers in 2023.The ReStores don’t just accept donations of cabinets: sometimes we go and pull them ourselves. In 2023, the ReStore’s Deconstruction team completed 82 jobs, extracting reusable building materials prior to remodels or renovations performed by local homeowners, contractors, or businesses. According to a 2018 study conducted by the EPA, “the construction industry contributed more than 600 million tons of waste to landfills, and of that 600 million, 90% was contributed from demolitions.” Our Deconstruction program not only diverts usable material from the landfill, but it also provides an important source of funding for Asheville Habitat by reselling extracted items into the community through the ReStores. Learn more about our Deconstruction program and its economic and environmental benefits in this article by Deconstruction Supervisor Colin Bristow.

ReThinking the Holidays

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The holiday season is upon us!  And after rethinking how we do almost everything this past year, many of us now find ourselves rethinking how to do the holidays.  Whether you are staying at home for the first time ever and wondering how to celebrate without gathering, or whether your values no longer align with the traditional consumption and spending-centric holiday model- the ReStore has a few re-thought ideas on how to do the holidays this year… maybe with a little more reuse and home time, and a little less spending and gathering.

ReThinking the Holidays

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The holiday season is upon us!  And after rethinking how we do almost everything this past year, many of us now find ourselves rethinking how to do the holidays.  Whether you are staying at home for the first time ever and wondering how to celebrate without gathering, or whether your values no longer align with the traditional consumption and spending-centric holiday model- the ReStore has a few re-thought ideas on how to do the holidays this year… maybe with a little more reuse and home time, and a little less spending and gathering.

ReUse: Spotlight on Fabric

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Did you know textiles make up almost 7% of our landfills? And about 95% of the textiles in our landfills are either reusable or recyclable. This means that even those pieces of clothing that are so worn out that Goodwill doesn’t want them, still have a significant post-consumer future ahead– if you’ll give it to them!

Asheville Habitat Accepts Environmental Excellence Award

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By Andy Barnett, Executive Director

“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”

― Henry David Thoreau, Familiar Letters (1860)

Asheville Habitat doesn’t think of itself as an environmental organization, so it came as a little bit of a shock to receive a 2019 Environmental Excellence Award from Asheville Greenworks this spring.  Our understanding of a safe, healthy affordable home is so intertwined with the notion of a “tolerable planet” that it goes unnoticed and unremarked.

Like most of the social justice solutions our community seeks, affordable housing and environmental stewardship are not competing interests. They are “yes, and” solutions. For example, your furniture donation to the ReStore diverts waste from the landfill AND builds affordable homes. When Habitat builds a new home, achieving high energy performance standards reduces our community’s energy use AND saves the homeowner money. Replacing an obsolete heating system in a home reduces the energy demand from our aging housing stock AND it means that an elder in our community can age in place safely and with dignity.

I am grateful for this award as a reminder of the impact of our choices, and a reminder that the best solutions solve multiple problems. As one of many like-minded businesses and organizations advancing environmental stewardship and sustainability in our community, I’m honored that GreenWorks bestowed Asheville Habitat with an award this year.

 

Photo by Angela Wilhelm, Citizen Times