Friday 18th October 2024
I’m not sure I’ve got enough space in this blog to talk about everything that St Vincent De Paul in Eugene, Orgeon do, or everything that I saw and learned during my visit. It would take much longer still to discuss what I’ve learned and took away from hearing Terry talk over more than 15 years. So, consider this an introduction and taster to SVdP and feel free to get in touch to ask for a lot more! Or (small plug) come to the Circular Communities Scotland conference on November 13th and I’m sure I’ll be talking about this in more depth in my session.
In a nutshell:
Established in 1953, St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County (SVdP) today is the county’s largest nonprofit human-services organization Our human-services work is supported by revenue from the successful brand of ‘social enterprise’ honed across five decades by former SVdP Executive Director Terry McDonald. Still, our earned income covers only about half of our annual budget.
In terms of reuse, they run 14 thrift stores each taking in donations which are then (in the case of textiles and homewares) pooled to central warehousing where they are sorted, graded and repacked into ‘ready to sell’ units for each store.
To give some context to these stores, I got to speak to one of their 14000 sq ft store managers. They have 24 staff processing and selling and around 70-80% of what they bring in is reused or recycled. They receive around 200 cars per day of donations…I’ve noticed that everywhere I go people talk about stuff in terms of number of donations, not weight or even number of items. They keep track of how many people come to donate but there’s no recording of the throughput and volume other than what they sell through their tills. More on that in the Urban Ore post too.
This isn’t their only reuse activity though as they also:
· Sell online sales via ebay and amazon
· Run a used car lot
· Operate a mattress deconstruction and recycling facility
· Recycle appliances, electronics and…..styrofoam.
I really enjoy hearing about the focus on materials and the dedication to finding the most appropriate and financially sustainable route for each, whether that is to 1) seek a contract to cover costs, 2) a change in policy to drive material, 3) keeping on top of consumer trends for reuse resale opportunities or 4) pivoting to new markets when prices change.
Some examples of those that I saw on the tour:
1) Terry talked about the development of the Styrofoam project from something that was a loss-leader (developing and refining the process, and acting as a reason for people to come to them with their donations rather than elsewhere) to now being a contracted service that covers its costs.
2) Over 402,000 mattresses were recycled from Oregon and California last year, bringing in $8.3M. In 2022, Oregon became the fourth U.S. state to enact a law establishing a statewide mattress recycling program, which will take affect from Jan 1 2025. SVdP were heavily involved in the development of this and have of course been instrumental in showcasing that it is possible by developing the process and end markets.
They also collect used air conditioning units from household recycling centres and receive the $20 per unit the consumer pays at the site to reclaim the gas.
3) Worn workwear that used to be sent for textile recycling is now flying off the shelves as ‘distressed clothing’! Ends of Candles are also brought together to be melted and made into new products.
4) The income from donated jewellery has really increased recently and coupled with the increase in the price of gold, this is a product that is getting some special attention to be pooled from all shops, sorted for gold, high items to be sold on ebay and priced appropriately.
All four of these examples can only be achieved at scale. Volume is key to influencing or creating any credible market.
All in, 22.7 million pounds (10,300 tonnes!!) of materials was recycled (and diverted from landfills) last financial year. That’s in one year alone!
You can see more detailed information on their impact and their income splits in their impact report
All of this incredible work supports their community, helping more than 35,000 people last year in myriad ways as they work to restore stability or perhaps achieve it for the first time in their lives – mainly through providing affordable housing. They operate over 1600 units of their own purpose built housing, two day access centres for those experiencing homelessness and several night shelter programmes. Their recent enterprise is building very affordable (and sustainable) mobile homes but that’s another story! Their housing support is well known throughout the county and drives support for their recycling and reuse programmes.
I asked Terry about Community Wealth Building and if that’s a term that they use as I’ve been struggling to hear it elsewhere (although everywhere I have visited is ABSOLUTELY delivering multiple CWB benefits) - “You train the labour force, you take people in the community from having no skills to having trades and that’s building wealth in the community”. Mary Lou from Urban Ore had more great ways of describing the layers of wealth that are built by reuse which I’ll put into a future blog post.
In another conversation around reuse targets, Terry spoke about the focus being on materials that have value rather than materials that have carbon impact. Again, this focus on the materials and products and their end markets being so important to driving the reuse sector.
Later, while touring the mattress deconstruction facility I heard about the constant innovation that has to go on to find the most effective methods of deconstruction of constantly evolving designs of mattresses. It hit me like a tonne of…well mattresses… why is the reuse sector spending so much of their own time, money and resource to solve the industries problems?
It was such a stark realisation that the board rooms of these two sectors are having very different conversations. On the one hand mattresses designers are dreaming up new ways to sell different products for not a care at all for the conversations happening in the reuse sector on ‘how on earth are we going to deconstruct this mattress safely that we’ve just seen is coming down the pipeline’.
I think my new passion might be in EPR….watch out haha.
More pictures and videos in this album on my flickr page
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