Reclaimed, Recycled, Reused…
Posted: Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
I love finding out about businesses that use reclaimed materials to create new products or repurpose materials and save them from the landfills. If you are remodeling your home or just want to make some small changes but don’t want to spend a lot of money or buy brand new stuff then a great place to visit in Madison is Habitat ReStore. I volunteered for them some years ago to find out what they did and had a lot of fun while I was doing it. What they do (and what I helped do) is find houses that are going to be demolished and remove any materials in the house that can be resold and reused. I helped remove maple flooring piece by piece so that it can be bought and reused in somebody else’s house. We removed kitchen cabinets, doors, bathroom sinks, mirrors, lights, fans, wood trim, outlet covers, windows, and anything else we thought had more life in it and could continue to be of use to someone. The materials they recover are sold in their retail stores and the money they make goes towards Habitat for Humanity homes.
Other companies that use reclaimed wood is Full Circle Furniture and Full Circle Wood. Full Circle Furniture is a Madison business that creates beautiful tables and benches using old wood doors.
I found Full Circle Wood while looking for Full Circle Furniture’s website. They use discarded wood pallets to make furniture such as folding tables, filing cabinets, and poker chip carousels. The only downside of their reuse of materials is that they use polyurethane coatings on their finished products. It does give it a nice shine and durable surface, but its just another toxic substance we are putting into our environment.