As Americans creep closer to 100 years of postwar consumerism, it can feel at times that we're drowning in stuff.

The landfills certainly reflect that.

But growing awareness of this issue has resulted in some pretty creative ways of reversing it.

Social media and how to videos and innovative do gooders are extending the life of products from vacuum cleaners to kitchen utensils, you name it.

That's thanks to the reuse movement.

Pay close attention because we think something might just catch your eye.

I'm Jasmine Singer and this is Environmental Connections.

Please help me welcome Jacob Fox, the sustainability officer for the town and city of Geneva, New York, who will share insights on how municipal programs and policies are supporting reuse initiatives and inspiring community participation in sustainability efforts.

Welcome, Jacob.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for being here.

You're doing very cool stuff and I'm excited to dig in.

We have Mary Jo Garofoli, who plays an important role in one of Rochester's Buy Nothing groups, which is a platform that creates a sustainable and neighborly way to divert unwanted items from landfills.

Hi, Mary Jo.

Thank you, Jasmin, for having me.

I'm very excited to share.

I think you're wearing things from your Buy Nothing group today?

I am.

Well, you look amazing.

Yeah.

Well, you look amazing.

Yeah.

The scarf was gifted, my earrings, my necklace.

Wow.

You're on brand.

I love it.

I love it so much.

And we have Kimberly DePrez, executive director of Greenovation, which helps people in Rochester reuse things that others no longer need and thus keeps these items out of the landfill.

Welcome, Kim.

Thank you very much, Jasmin.

I want to start with you, Jacob, and I want to read a couple sobering, sobering statistics from the World Bank.

Globally, we generate more than 2 billion tons of municipal solid waste annually.

Whoa.

That was a tough one to swallow.

And while high income countries, including the US, only account for 16% of the global population, they generate 34% of the world's waste.

So that's about 683 million tons.

I can't even imagine that number.

So considering the scale of the problem, what impact can a town the size of Geneva have?

Yeah, I mean, I love the line local solutions for global problems.

And, you know, we've set up municipalities to look after water, look after roads, you know, and why not waste?

Some communities historically have.

But, you know, it's kind of gotten away.

It's this whole public private pole.

And, you know, I just think that municipalities can be a good model that kind of looks after and make sure it gets done properly.

Private actors can have a role in that.

But, you know, we need to think about waste as a community service.

But I want to ask you about Geneva's forthcoming Re-use center, which I learned about by way of Ithaca's Reuse Center.

What exactly is a reuse center?

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people know traditionally about thrift stores and about donation barns and it's taken a lot of forms.

And Ithaca, they've pioneered a model down there where it's kind of combined a lot of those things where it's like people have items that still have value that other people want.

You know, we could showcase those things in a space and then we could build off of that.

So let's say some of the items are lightly used and need a little fixing.

All right, let's bring fixers and, you know, let's say, you know, someone wants to start a business that, you know, requires some raw material that, oh, by the way, we happen to have a lot of it, then, you know, that can jump start a business.

And so it's kind of, you know, recognizing that there's still value out there, having, you know, a very intentional way to capture it and then, you know, building off ideas from there.

What initiatives has the town of Geneva implemented to help residents repair and reuse objects?

Yeah.

So the two things that I'd point to is we have a free stuff day where we just have this lawn in front of our highway garage and we say, come out and bring stuff 10 to noon and then we'll organize at noon to 1 and then come out and pick up things 1 to 3.

And, you know, it's unbelievable the amount of stuff people bring out.

And we have a very strict, you know, 1 p.m. and they're waiting there on the line just, like, on a marathon, just ready to run and get the stuff.

And then we've also done a fix it clinic in years past and, you know, people bring in things and we have hobbyists in our community, tinkerers, people who are good at fixing things.

And we kind of match them up.

And so people get things fixed.

But also, you know, we can kind of have the community experience.

I know you can't speak for everyone, but what would you say the impetus is for people to do this?

Do you think it's the environment at all or saving money?

What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, saving money obviously factors into from a waste perspective, I mean, some of the things we fixed, you know, vacuum cleaners, the amount of rare earth materials in vacuum cleaners and it's actually not broken.

There's just hair stuck in it and you just run a knife through it and it fixes it.

So it's something, you know, that person was going to throw it away.

They brought it down, had a good time, got it fixed, didn't have to buy a new vacuum cleaner.

You know, that's a lot of transformation in just a two hour period.

It's very touching.

It's just, it's very moving.

I never thought I'd be moved by the idea of fixing a vacuum cleaner, but for some reason I am.

I want to talk to Mary Jo Garofoli.

I know that you're a top contributor to a Buy Nothing group here in Rochester.

So what is a Buy Nothing group?

So Buy Nothing is actually a national movement where it fosters local community connections and a gifting environment from our abundance.

So we give, we receive, we share, we borrow, For example, I moved here in 2017.

I joined Buy Nothing in October of 2017, having moved and brought too much stuff with me.

As one does.

Right, and realized I had too much stuff and needed to gift or get rid of it.

And I was also looking to make a community connection and someone shared the Buy Nothing with me.

So I joined and was able to give gifts but also receive them.

And it's not only gifts of physical items is also gift of time talent.

Sometimes it's just company to foster that hyper local gifting economy from our abundance and making a real connection with your actual physical neighbors.

is there a good vibe on it, or are people kind of like me, me, me, no, me?

No.

So, the Buy Nothing philosophy is we gift freely and we receive gifts freely.

So there are no rules as to who one chooses to gift to some things might be.

I'm going to let this simmer.

For example, I had a printer that was gifted to me by someone downsizing their storage unit.

I said, Hey, I can place that.

I let it simmer for a couple of days.

Other gifters choose to do first come first serve because they just really want to get rid of it.

Sometimes we ask, Hey, tell me what you're going to do with this item.

Or one of the things I downsized was my abundance of spices.

I love to cook, and it was, Well, so tell me what you're, tell me about your favorite dishes to make.

Not that that had any input or reflection on actually who I chose to gift to, but it was fun to learn something new about that individual who was actually a neighbor.

So tell me about something like maybe surprising that you either gifted or received or maybe you saw come across the pages of the Buy Nothing group In my case, I have actually not purchased a new item since I moved here in July of 2017, a physical item.

and I moved here for the purpose of future grandchildren.

And I now have six grandchildren under the age of five, three my own, three pseudo and every single educational toy, portacrib, strollers, car seats, everything.

Every single baby item you can imagine I have acquired and been gifted through the Buy Nothing group.

I want to chat with Kim DePrez.

Kim is the executive director and general manager of Greenovation, which, I love Greenovation.

Welcome, Kim.

Thank you, Jasmin.

Thank you for being here.

Although the nonprofit of thrift stores has been around for a long time, just the idea that a thrift store would be a nonprofit, Greenovation is the first one that I have come across that has an explicit purpose to keep items out of landfills.

Can you tell me about the origin of Greenovation?

Sure.

Yeah.

So the original founder is a guy named Jay Rowe, and he used to work at Rehouse when it was on East Main Street.

And then the old Vietnam Veterans thrift store that was, Greeno’s original home, which was 1199 East Main Street, it came up as an option for rent.

So he went over there, rented out the building to start Greenovation, which was at the, the origin had lots of branches to one tree.

There was a deconstruction branch where they were deconstructing houses.

There was a tiny home building project.

There was a tool library, there was a workshop and there was a store.

Pretty much none of that was sustainable without having multiple grants and funding, which we didn't have.

And it started to go south.

Jay had to take a step back, but I had started volunteering and the board asked me if I wanted to be the interim executive director.

That was in 2015.

It's interesting how that worked.

Yes.

Yeah.

So it's had a lot of ups and downs over time.

We've had to move twice since the pandemic, which was fun.

But we try to repurpose as many things.

We have a workshop that we try to fix items and we love our Buy Nothing friends.

We wish we could be part of Buy Nothing, but they don't allow stores.

And that's okay because most of our people who volunteer will sometimes take items that they see needed in their Buy Nothing group's home to give to them.

We normally have like a free cabinet, free closet, free little library, and yeah, we just try to work with the community to try to use salvaged materials and fix up things to make them more usable and desirable.

And as a regular shopper, I admit, at Greenovation, I know that there is more than just donated goods in your huge and very eclectic space.

I've also seen upcycled items by local makers.

So can you talk a bit about these collaborations and how they came to be?

Yeah, so we originally, Greeno was supposed to have a couple of different vendors and artisans that work.

We encourage sustainability, we encourage fixing of items and repurposing them to make them more desirable.

Everybody has had some ugly furniture that they grew up with and it either comes back to be desirable or it doesn't.

And the desirable pieces, you know, that's great, someone's going to still want them, but the ones that are particleboard or just ugly veneers, things like that, or they've got something broken or chipped, we try to fix those up and we encourage all of our vendors and consignors to do that.

So we have right now five different vendors.

That's what we call them.

They rent booths within Greenovation.

They have their sections.

They can't sell anything like new, really.

Like there can be like a couple of things, right?

Like if you got like a pot for Christmas that you don't want, you can sell it.

But we encourage them to make stuff.

We've got a guy who makes a lamps out of different things, bookcases, coffee tables.

We have an artist in the store as well that she's a local painter and she'll upcycle and make things and then we can sign for not for profits in the Rochester area.

So we have two current not for profits that can sign items and that helps generate item or generate income for them.

Okay, sticking with the idea of upcycling and like DIY upcycling projects, I'm just curious what project you might recommend to an upcycling neophyte who's never tried it before?

The easiest things are either painting like sanding something down, repainting it or staining it, or dining room chairs reapply, upholstery them and changing out the fabric or the foam gives it a whole new life.

And if you want to, you can even paint them or stain them.

It's the easiest upholstery project you can do.

It's generally just like a little bit like a square.

And so you just fold the fabric over that square, staple it, put it right back on, done.

I've got a new chair.

Is there ever a time where something cannot be repaired?

What about if there's a thing perhaps it was cheaply made.

Is there a point where it's just garbage?

Who wants to take that?

Jacob?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's really important to have that conversation because there's the term people say wish cycling.

It's like, oh, you know, I'm throwing it in there and I hope it works.

And then, you know, it's burdening the recycling industry on the back end.

And so there absolutely are things that can't be recycled or reused.

And if we become aware of those things and we know exactly where they need to go, like if they are toxic or hazardous they need to go or if they are the way, there's categories.

And so putting those things in their categories, getting a good end of life procedure, can at least ensure safety.

For the sake of the environment, remanufacturing is a growing industry.

But to make remanufacturing real to scale up, we must find technologies that can automatically sort components and parts that is coming back from the field.

And that's what we are doing at GIS.

The Golisano Institute for Sustainability is an academic and applied research unit at RIT.

Broadly, the mission of GIS is to reduce the environmental footprint of manufacturing.

Today, a lot of the focus isn't on just isolated research in the lab, ivory tower, kind of blue sky things, but we're working very closely with companies that want to implement and improve their remanufacturing processes.

Remanufacturing is a process that the products are returned from the field, all the parts are inspected.

You repair parts as you can.

The expectation is that product, when it’s remanufactured, has the same exact performance warranty, or reliability, durability as a new product.

A lot of the technologies we're working on now are using advanced computing technologies, machine learning, AI type technologies to help in particular on the inspection of parts, which is a very manual and labor intensive process.

The problem with manufacturing today is that after that usage, whether it's automotive parts or garments or anything, they get piled up and then they get shipped back to the remanufacturers.

So the first step any remanufacturers have to do is to sort them.

If you want to do it manually, even to train this person is next to impossible.

And if you do so, what we hear from the remanufacturer is that these people just quit after a few weeks.

We want to train a computer model with the images of this part.

So the model knows this part is this, this part belongs to that vehicle, and then the quality of this part is good or bad or in-between.

Living right down the road from the landfill where I'm from and I guess my experience in my head before was just things come in, they get dumped and you leave it.

Coming here, it kind of opens your eyes to all the different processes and tools and I guess how there's just a lot more to go into it than most people think.

With the advances in technology over the last 5 to 10 years, it's become easier and easier to do this.

There's more and more opportunities.

So in this project, we are using computer vision, machine learning and robotics to disassemble the battery, which is an essential first step for remanufacturing of this EV battery packs.

I want to make this process streamlined and more accurate so that it's much faster and it's easier for them to sort everything out and move forward to the biggest step of selling the remanufacturing parts to customers.

I'm curious about the idea of how social change still happens, person to person and by example.

So with that, Mary Jo, what are your friends and family think about your involvement in the Buy Nothing group?

Do they think Grandma’s bananas?

They actually don't think I'm bananas because I've been able to also gift items as they're downsizing to members in my community, in my neighborhood, my son and daughter in law are getting ready to move.

And so they've downsized things and they're going to donate them, said, Give those to me.

I can place them.

And so then I pick up the items and then I share on my local Facebook.

People will come and pick up or sometimes we drop off.

How can people access the Buy Nothing group?

So you can Google it, look for Buy Nothing project and there is a tab on that page where you can locate your local buy nothing group in any state in the United States, there's also a travel Buy Nothing group that's national and you just look for your location.

You look up Rochester, New York, and your streets because it goes by cross streets, and answer the few questions, the membership questions and join a great community.

We have a lot of emails from you, so let's just get to a few of those.

So Ann says, I don't know if your guests can address this or not but so many people I know throw recyclables away because they claim they end up in the same place anyway.

I know one or two reuse, collect, refuse collectors who don't require separating trash from recyclables and explain that it's done at the disposable hubs.

Is that true?

Jacob, can you take that?

Yeah.

I mean, kind of what exists and most modern recycling is what's called material recovery facilities, called MRFs for short, and they're, you know, these big I mean, imagine a big room where things are dumped and then they're sorted in a variety of, you know, macro ways.

We're talking dozers going back and forth and then microwaves, you know, with magnets and, you know, robotics and that whole thing.

And unfortunately, the zero sort, I mean, we could spend a whole segment talking about zero sort.

And that is in that gray area is where there's a lot of, you know, either bad actors or misinformation or a combination of both.

And, you know, glass and aluminum are ones that have, you know, really good recycling as far as like, you can recycle them, you know, consistently plastic.

You really start to get into the microplastic space and you get to globally moving it around, even paper and cardboard recycling.

To some extent, like there's a lot of it that can go into the food waste stream, like the compost stream.

There is some that can be beneficially used, but we really need to look at our recycling industry as a whole and have a have a good thought about that because there's been a lot that's been told to people and there's been a lot of people taking ownership over certain things.

And when things go differently, when you see your recycling get dumped into a trash, you feel broken, but at the same time, if it was going to go there anyways, I think that the broader conversation we need to have.

So let's take a couple of our phone calls.

Hayle, are you there?

Welcome to Environmental Connections.

Thanks for calling.

Yes, I have two rather different questions The first one might be more common.

I have a large library of several thousand books, mostly nonfiction and related to science and philosophy, and I'd like to either sell or share them online or in person.

So that's how to reuse books.

And the second question is, after 30 years of operating a small farm where you have gasoline and diesel engines with 12 volt batteries, you have a lot of chargers.

Well, I have several now sitting on my front porch that don't work.

And I don't know much about repairing such things, although I have a little experience how to deal with those two.

I appreciate that so much.

So let's start with the easier of the two, which is the books.

This is a similar question that our other caller had.

Mary Jo, what do you think?

So with regards to books, there's a number of things one can do.

You can place them in local Little Free Libraries, which you can Google Little Free Library talk and find a location nearest to you.

And those are always welcome.

You can check with a local university and ask if they need any specific topics.

You know, a bundle of books on a particular topic.

You could also check with your library and ask if you can provide them in their next free library book giveaway.

And you can also check with your local schools, elementary and high school, middle and high school.

Those librarians and teachers are always looking for appropriate reading material for the variety of students that they have.

Great.

Thank you.

I love that so much.

Makes me thinking of the Encyclopedia Britannica as I grew up with, but thankfully I don't have those anymore, so I don't know what we would do with them.

But what about the question of the chargers, Kim?

What do you think?

You must have a lot of people come to you with this exact question.

Yeah, we get people who bring in lots of different items of all sorts.

So generally when it comes to things that might have a toxic material, that's when I call up Eco Park and ask their opinion if it's something that can be recycled or broken down, we'll try to do that.

I'm not sure what I would suggest for the charger.

I don't know if Jacob has a better idea, but my first call would just be the Eco Park.

Yeah, I was thinking that too.

I mean, I'm not the expert here, but I was thinking probably they do have electronic recycling.

And it is unfortunate because you know how specific these chargers are for, but my guess is a lot of them are antiquated at this point.

What do you think?

Yeah, the charger’s probably hazardous material at this point.

And unfortunately the books I know enough lawyers to know that they have so many books in their basement.

You know, back before everything was digitized, they had hardcover books that they had to read.

And you go to basically any law office in the country and they have just walls of books.

And they also probably have a basement full of too.

And there's really like, that is a problem out there.

We're talking real estate is being taken up by these things.

So what do we do with them?

Art projects?

Christmas wrapping paper?

We got to figure out something and build houses out of some of these books.

Our local donation like Salvation Army and stuff, has had, you know, book bans for times because people, you know, especially at the end of the school year.

Book bands, but not banned books.

But yes.

Big difference.

Have you seen my Encyclopedia Britannica, by the way?

I was just about to say, like, I bet you someone else there's burdening someone else.

Well, yeah, totally.

We have a few sets at Greeno right now.

You do?

Yep.

I won't get rid of them.

Honestly, you could totally upcycle that too.

Would be a very cool, like, table or something like that.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

there's a lot that you can do with repurposing books, you know, if they're past the desirability of enjoyment.

I know a lot of people who just make them into secret boxes.

Yes, I was just going to say those are so cute when you kind of drill out the inside into a heart or something.

Yep.

Yep.

And it's actually fairly easy to do.

The first one I did, I did with an X-Acto knife.

Don't recommend.

Okay.

Took a long time and got up a couple of trips to urgent care, right?

Yeah.

Just a few bloody fingers.

Trash to some, treasure to others.

The next time you're getting ready to throw something away, think about the options.

You didn't know you had.

I'm Jasmin Singer.

Until next time, thanks for making today's Environmental Connections.