Community Spotlight

by Emily Landes

Given that everything from plates to clothes to sophisticated electronics is considered “disposable” these days, it might be surprising to learn that the landscape of American garbage used to look very different. Whether it was because of hard economic times or to save resources for soldiers overseas, reuse and conservation was an ingrained part of life for many Americans in the first half of the 20th century.

But, according to Matthew Levesque, program manager of San Francisco’s only nonprofit salvage yard, that all changed after the end of World War II. Manufacturers took advantage of new technologies and a public that was tired of saving every scrap, and sold them on the advantages of cheap products that could simply be thrown away when they outlived their usefulness. In a culture where the newest and shiniest objects were soon considered the best, the salvage yards of the past quickly became an unfashionable place to find building materials. The final nail in the salvage coffin came when garbage trucks installed trash compactors, which crushed formerly reusable items beyond repair.

These wasteful habits lasted for decades, until people started to wake up to the fact that garbage can never really be thrown “away,” Levesque says. “Where is ‘away’ anyway?” he asks. “It all goes somewhere.” Always a leader in environmental awareness, San Francisco became the home to the first recycling nonprofit in Northern California in the late 1970s–San Francisco Community Recyclers. The organization started off recycling everyday household garbage like bottles, cans and newspapers. But, as the nonprofit grew, it realized that it needed to expand to other areas of waste. After considering everything from rug recycling to plastic shredding, SFCR decided to focus on building materials, which make up 15% to 18% of San Francisco’s landfills, according to Levesque. SFCR called the new venture Building Resources and set up shop on Amador Street in the Bayview district.

That first year the sole employee of Building Resources was Levesque, who had a construction and art background and just happened upon the want ad in the paper. “They said, ‘Here’s the keys. Start this thing,’” he recalls. The yard was disorganized and accepted almost anything. The only help came from a few Conservation Corps volunteers. Levesque rarely went home to his family, putting in long hours every day getting the organization off its feet.

Eventually, all the hard work paid off and Building Resources was able to become more and more selective, and therefore more and more of a valuable resource to the growing group of contractors, landscapers, home owners, rental housing providers and artists who quickly came to rely on the gently used materials in the yard. Today, 12 years after it first opened its doors, the organization is very selective about what it will and will not accept. It will happily take most building materials in good repair, like old tubs and toilets, apartment unit doors and windows, and bricks and stone. But it won’t take lumber filled with nails or rot, or most wood less than five feet in length; anything made of particle board (“Nobody wants it and it falls apart,” says Levesque); and “unsaleable” cast resin sinks. “It’s got to be something reusable. Everything that comes in has got to go out in pretty much the same condition it came in,” he explains. “Whatever comes in has to find a home.”

Luckily, most of what comes in does find a home. In a best-case scenario, an apartment building owner who is putting in new lighting fixtures throughout the building would bring in all the old fixtures, and get a tax-deduction receipt from Building Resources for the contribution. Then another owner looking for cheap fixtures (Building Resources’s materials are one-half to one-third the retail price), would buy the donated materials and reuse them, rather than buying new fixtures elsewhere. This simple model saved over 12,000 tons of building materials from the landfill in 2006 and Levesque expects that number to be even higher in 2007.

Sometimes Building Resources’s employees are available to help people sort through the yard, but often they count on people to be “self-motivated,” says Levesque. They always try to give newcomers a general layout of the yard, and during slow times (like Sunday mornings and the winter months) apartment owners may even get personalized assistance when trying to find that perfect era-appropriate replacement door for a 1930s apartment house. But just try getting that kind of assistance on “nightmare” Saturdays or “hellacious” Mondays, when most people come in to pick up new items or drop off old ones, respectively. “If you want help on Monday, take a number and wait until Tuesday,” quips Levesque, who adds that his crew unloaded 32 truckloads on a recent Monday.

With all of that material coming in, of course, it’s impossible to find a new home for everything and Building Resources ends up throwing away four to five tons of materials every few weeks. Sometimes the products just don’t sell, but more often the organization throws out broken items that were lost due to accidents (like the time a forklift driver swerved to avoid a customer and hit a whole rack of toilets) or vandalism.

For several years, Levesque had such a problem with thieves who would break in to steal the valuable aluminum frames from windows, and leave piles of glass behind, that he stopped accepting aluminum-framed windows and doors at all. “We would come in every morning and there would be this very tidy, big pile of glass on the ground and no frames. All those windows or sliding doors that just came in were gone, and all we had was this big pile of glass,” he recalls.

But one day Levesque realized that even these supposedly useless glass shards (which cost him $600 a week to clean up and dispose of) could be given new life as beach glass in people’s landscaping and gardens. But how could he do mechanically what the ocean does naturally? Real glass tumblers were too expensive, so he ended up modifying a small cement mixer and started a new organization under the Building Resources umbrella: the Red Shovel Glass Company.

Today, what used to be trash has turned into a growing business, with two employees of its own and three 1,000-pound cement mixers rolling 24 hours a day. Levesque has also used a similar technique to take the rough edges off of broken pottery. Today, the glass and terra cotta businesses together make up a good chunk of Building Resources’s overall budget.

Further contributions to the largely self-financed organization also come from educational courses that Levesque teaches at home-and-garden shows and in city schools. The student programs can be modified to suit any age group from grade schoolers to high school students. One popular course for younger students is called, “How Much Energy Is in My Shoe?” Levesque picked a shoe because it’s something everyone has, but almost no one thinks about where it came from and the resources used to make it. For older learners, Levesque goes right to the heart of the matter for Building Resources; he asks students to consider all the parts that make up their homes, where the materials came from and where they will end up.

By reaching out to a new generation, Levesque hopes to teach young people about traditional American values like reusing and reducing materials. He envisions a day when people will once again think of salvage yards like Building Resources as a ubiquitous part of the retail landscape, akin to other “reusers” like the Salvation Army or Goodwill. “Building Resources is just like a thrift store,” he says, “except instead of shoes and shirts and blenders and dishes, we carry windows and doors and lighting and stone.”

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or SF Apartment Magazine. Emily Landes is the managing editor of SF Apartment Magazine and Rental Housing. Copyright © 2007 by SF Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.