Restoration hardware (and tiles, tubs, lamps, windows)

SPRINGFIELD -- The rising trend in environment-friendly recycling does not happen in your house: It is your house. Across the country, hundreds of stores have opened in recent years that sell surplus and recycled building materials to consumers.

Imagine a cross between the Salvation Army and The Home Depot.

A thriving example in Massachusetts is ReStore, which was opened in 2001 by the nonprofit Center for Ecological Technology. It's an 8,500-square-foot building-materials store in the inner city that sells surplus and salvaged building materials and the occasional furnishings, from player pianos and kitchen cabinets to lighting fixtures and pedestal sinks. New items are priced 50 percent off retail; used goods are usually 60 percent to 75 percent below.

The difference between this new breed of re-use store and a traditional salvage yard is the intent, says Holly Milton-Benoit, Restore's manager and a former Home Depot employee. "Re-use stores like ours are created in order to help promote sustainable building practices, make home improvement more affordable to more people, and keep reusable materials out of landfills, lessening the pressure on them."

The underlying philosophy behind ReStore is to eliminate the waste of the many forms of energy that help to create products of all types. "When you think of a door, for example," says Milton-Benoit, "it started out as a tree. Someone took the time to harvest and process it, to transport it to a factory. Other materials created elsewhere are incorporated in the door, as is the work of many people from start to finish, from forest to store to home.

"If that door gets thrown away when it's still usable, all that energy is lost. We want to see all the energy put into the creation of the door continue to serve its purpose."

At ReStore, cast-iron bathtubs and radiators are lined up outside, and just inside maps are available to help find everything else. There are doors galore, rolls of laminate and linoleum, two old wood stoves, dozens of air filters, mirrored bathroom cabinets with etched glass, lots of tile (mostly white, some slate), and large kitchen cabinet sets of up to 15 pieces, among many other items. Tammi McBath, the store's marketing and outreach coordinator, points out the old farm sinks. "People come from all over for these because they don't make them like this anymore."

Their customers range from neighbors to visitors from Vermont and the Berkshires.

A new unfinished oak mantlepiece is selling for $150, as is an old mission-style oak table. (While they don't normally carry furniture, they will occasionally if they think it will quickly sell.) There are thousands of knobs and pulls of different styles for $1 each; light fixtures, including mod '60s and '40s lantern styles, are just $5 each.

McBath recalls the oddest item they had: a phone booth from the 1940s that was purchased by one of their regulars for $250. The stock changes constantly, and shoppers looking for vintage finds are common. You can sign up for e-mail updates on new stock (go to restoreonline.org/about.htm), but the real secret to finding what you want, says Milton-Benoit, is to visit often. "We have people who come by every day because they know if they don't, they'll miss something. Or we'll have folks who are building their own house and have a running list of materials they need, and they'll keep stopping by to see if what they need has come in. If they see a jacuzzi tub that fits their budget, they might decide to upgrade."

In Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, meanwhile, the Building Materials Resource Center has been pursuing a similar mission for even longer. It focuses even more closely on serving not-for-profit organizations and low- and moderate-income shoppers, who can join the center for $10 a year and purchase materials for a significant reduction of the center's already low prices. Typically, the center's prices for the general public are half of retail, and members' prices are half of that.

The decade-old center, which has 6,000 square feet of new and recycled building materials and will be expanding to 8,500 in the spring, is a spinoff from the 25-year-old member-controlled Boston Building Materials Coop next door. "It's an organization with a lot of heart," says Rex Passion, a retired construction company owner and a board member of the center. "Our company did a lot of high-end restoration work, and it would break my heart to remove kitchen cabinets that were only a few years old and have to send them to the dump. It was a repulsive thing to do. Now with BMRC, they'll end up in someone else's home, and the homeowner gets a tax break for the donation as well."

After three years of success, the folks at CET and ReStore are beginning to expand to a more active approach to reusing building materials. "When people decide to tear down a building," Milton-Benoit explained, "traditionally they do what is known as a 'crunch and dump.' They bulldoze it over, rendering everything in it completely unusable. What we are now doing is something we call deconstruction," in which a building is carefully dismantled to preserve as many reusable parts as possible. They get clients through word of mouth and referrals from contractors and others in the business.

About 136 million tons of construction and demolition debris were generated in the United States in 1998 alone (the last time it was measured), and only 20 percent to 30 percent was recovered. There are now over 1,000 deconstruction companies across the nation, and a directory of them has been compiled by the USDA Forest Products Laboratory. (To download the list, go to http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplgtr/fpl_gtr150.pdf.)

Milton-Benoit said the costs of a crunch and dump are roughly equal to a deconstruction when you take into account the market value of the materials salvaged, usually two-thirds of the house. And there is the satisfaction that you're ensuring that future generations will benefit from those windows, doors, cabinets, and fixtures.

For those wishing to donate building materials, either surplus or reusable, both stores offer pickup services. ReStore has a 16-foot box truck that makes the rounds all day Monday through Friday, picking up donated materials for free. The store has no limits on where it will go for pickups. Its truck has traveled as far as southern Connecticut, Woonsocket, R.I., and the Berkshires, and Milton-Benoit said that for better goods they'll travel farther.

The Building Materials Resource Center charges $25 inside Route 495 ($50 outside) for a pickup, less than what someone might pay to haul away what you don't need. But be sure what you are offering is needed: there are clear guidelines on its website at www.bostonbmrc.org.

After starting out with foundation and grant support, Springfield's ReStore broke even this year, a cause for celebration. And it isn't the only one celebrating. Thanks to ReStore, BMRC, and other reuse stores like them, there are growing numbers of people able to affordably renovate or build homes, and to put unwanted building materials back to good use, and out of a landfill.