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If you’re renovating, remodeling, or redecorating your home, consider deconstruction instead of demolition!
Deconstruction is the careful dismantling of buildings or parts of buildings in a way that enables the materials within to be reused. Harvesting home and building materials through deconstruction allows communities to generate economic, social, and environmental benefits from the project, while saving reusable materials from ending up in the landfill.
In a typical residential renovation project, a sizable portion of the materials (appliances, cabinets, doors, lighting, and more) can be deconstructed for reuse and redistributed to the community. Why pay for disposal to overcrowded landfills when you can give your goods a new life somewhere else? By donating your reusable materials to Community Forklift instead, you can save on dumping fees, keep reusable resources out of landfills, support a green nonprofit, help your local community, and enjoy a year-end tax deduction!
Community Forklift is D.C.’s hometown salvage warehouse. As a nonprofit reuse center for home goods and building supplies, our mission is to lift up local communities by making home repairs affordable, reducing waste, promoting reuse, creating green jobs, and providing essential goods for free to under-resourced residents and community organizations.
Since 2005, we have diverted over $45 million of usable materials from local landfills and converted them into community assets. We sell salvaged new and gently used building materials to the public at below-market prices at our reuse warehouse in Hyattsville, Maryland. We provide free materials to our neighbors in need and to community groups for projects that serve the greater good, impacting almost 600,000 individuals in the D.C. region. Washington City Paper readers have also voted us D.C.’s best green business every year since 2014!
