A nonprofit in Queens has everything and the kitchen sink. And it gets all of its inventory from construction, conversion, renovation and demolition sites around New York City, schlepping in with crews of trained workers to pick up appliances and materials that would otherwise be tossed into landfills.
Build It Green! NYC has since March 2005 partnered with developers to take what can best be described as housing by-products — kitchen appliances, bathroom fixtures, doors, shelves, carpets, paints, A/C units, light fixtures, etc. — and turn them around for sale out of its 18,000-square-foot Astoria warehouse. Developers pay Build It Green to swoop in and take away the trash, so to speak. In its first year, 200 tons of material passed through the group’s warehouse.
It’s a rare win for both nonprofits and for-profits — as well as the environment.
“It’s a movement late to New York,” Justin Green, program director of Build It Green, told The Real Deal. (The similarity between his surname and the nonprofit’s name are coincidental.) Similar groups are operating in other cities, such as San Francisco. “There was no place where builders could go with excess materials,” he said.
The first projects that Build It Green worked on were the Durst Organization’s One Bryant Park and its 125 West 31st Street condo development. The group’s next big project — and its largest to date — will be taking the excess from Buttonwood Real Estate’s conversion of 88 Greenwich Street from rentals into condos. The 37-story, 77-year-old building has 357 units. That’s a lot of kitchen sinks to be hauled to Astoria and sold.
From Lower Manhattan to Queens, and then to homes wherever. Some of Build It Green’s best customers, Green says, are small property managers and landlords as well as do-it-yourself homeowners sniffing out a deal.
“With the skyrocketing costs of construction and the expensiveness of housing in New York, it’s a bargain,” said Andrew Heiberger, founder and CEO of Buttonwood.
Heiberger said his firm connected with Build It Green through Habitats for Humanity. (The developer was looking for some way not to toss all the conversion’s by-products.) By mid-July, the nonprofit’s work at 88 Greenwich Street, which will be called the Greenwich Club Residences post-conversion, will be in full swing, Heiberger said. Sales there are expected to start by the winter of 2007.
Build It Green’s profits go toward support of Solar One, an environmental education program based in the city. The nonprofit hopes to be able to tackle less ambitious jobs like the dismantling of a single kitchen in addition to its big projects. “As we grow,” Green said, “we’ll be able to go out and do smaller jobs.”