ReSOURCE Burlington: An #Unlearning Business in the Heart of Vermont’s Queen City

Burlington, Vermont undoubtedly hosts a variety of businesses, many of which encourage rapid and thoughtless consumption. But hidden among name brand retailers and developed shopping centers is a culture of reuse that has thrived in a city that is often very conscious of its global impact. Secondhand clothing, furniture, and gear are sought after by many residents – often in hopes of saving cash, but also as a means of reducing an individual’s ecological footprint by avoiding new products. ReSource Burlington is a repair and resale business that attempts to divert household items from landfills. Since 1991, it has served the Burlington community by providing essential household goods such as appliances and furniture at a fraction of their retail price, and by employing the homeless and other people who would otherwise struggle to find employment and give them the skills necessary to advance in the work force. ReSource calls itself a “social enterprise,” which Wikipedia defines as “an organization that applies commercial strategies to maximize improvements in human and environmental well-being.” They note “this may include maximizing social impact alongside profits for external shareholders.” ReSource Burlington is a social enterprise that advances local economic growth and promotes sustainable consumption of resources in its employment initiatives and commitment to reuse throughout the five stages of the materials economy. With more than 25 years of dedicated work, ReSource has become an institution that makes secondhand goods available and reliable to Burlington residents while providing employment and job training opportunities for the locals.

ReSource writes that their mission is “to meet community and individual needs through education and job skills training, environmental stewardship, and economic opportunities.” This mission is a major influence on their decisions as a business from the early stages, and is a guiding principle when sourcing their materials and preparing them for resale. Since it is a secondhand shop, ReSource only sells goods that have already been used once. One of their most unique departments is their large appliance resale department, which offers items like refrigerators, washers and dryers, and stoves for significantly less than their retail price. Pete Bickmore, an expert in large appliance repair, has run this department since ReSource’s early days. Not only does he repair these appliances, but he has extended his expertise to trainees who have been able to obtain industry recognized certifications. Burlington residents are able to take their used, perhaps even broken appliances to ReSource instead of a landfill for a small fee, and know that these appliances will be repaired and resold at lower rates – perhaps providing a lower income family with the opportunity to own a washer and dryer when they may not have been able to before. In fact, the refrigerator in my apartment comes from ReSource Burlington!

ReSource relies on its used furniture and appliance outlets as their distribution centers for their products. With stores in Barre and Hyde Park, as well, the ReSource retailers are an incredibly unique aspect to their business model, and stand to make an impactful difference in the communities in which they operate. One of the primary goals of the ReSource stores is to employ those who struggle to find work, and to train them to have a skill set that will allow them to go further in their field. ReSource offers apprentice training in office administration, major appliance repair, advanced manufacturing, customer service and retail management, and woodshop entrepreneurship. They also offer work, experience training and provide programs to teach youth skills that are valued in the workplace. These programs began as a way to “create jobs and provide skills to unemployed individuals,” and originally trained homeless people, but have eventually broadened their programs to more trainees (resourcevt.org). These initiatives go beyond the work environment to provide support in areas of the community that may have lacked it before. In Barre, the ReSource outlet is home to a stage that can be lowered from the ceiling. “The Flying Stage at ReSOURCE has become a new center for community conversation, artistic expression and performance. On Jan. 23, for example, recovering addicts read to a crowd of over 100.” (Tron, 2016) In total, ReSource encompasses five community programs: ReBuild, RePair, ReStore, ReLief, and ReTrain (Tuff 2010).

Production and distribution are areas in which ReSource differs a great deal from traditional companies and industries. Annie Leonard would most likely argue that the companies that initially produced the refrigerators, dishwashers, etc. that ReSource sells have massive external costs of production that are not included in their price tag (expensive as they might be). The labor used to mine and extract the resources used to make them, the energy used to transport them (likely overseas), and the environmental impacts of their disposal in landfills are in no way accounted for, and the revenue from these products is instead pocketed by the large corporations that produce them. On the other hand, ReSource is taking items that in an economic sense are valueless (if broken and headed to a landfill) and adding value by fixing them, employing people in the community who are in need of jobs and teaching them skills that could benefit them later on. Though this approach doesn’t address some of the concerns surrounding the initial production of these products, ReSource’s business model surrounding a second life for them creates value in the community in a variety of ways.

While ReSource has made incredible efforts to #unlearn consumerism from their management and business model, it is important to consider how the community has responded to their presence as a business and as a local resource for repair and reuse. One of the reasons ReSource is able to continuously thrive in Burlington is the constant ebb and flow of college students moving in and out of apartments downtown, often without any furniture and a low budget to fill their new space (speaking entirely from experience – I went a few months with a box for a kitchen table). In fact, the move in and move out ‘seasons’ (early fall and late spring) are the store’s busiest times year round (Tuff, 2010). But low budget college students aren’t the only ones shopping at ReSource. The city of Burlington is unique in that reusing and repairing resources is a natural and attractive option to consumers, as is donating used materials for their eventual reuse. When I was visiting ReSource this week, there was a large stack of king sized mattresses in the store. Apparently, Marriott Corporate had decided to switch all mattresses in their hotels across the country to pillow top mattresses. The Burlington branch had donated all of their old mattresses to ReSource as they made this transition. In other cities, this mindset isn’t quite as natural and often requires a bit more encouragement.

In her short time working at ReSource, Allison Kornfeind, a graduate of UVM’s Rubenstein School, has begun to explore even more ways to utilize some of the materials that wind up at the ReSource store. Kornfeind notes that there are so many items that come to ReSource that might still be in good condition, but not of use to the people who leave them. She’s continuously impressed with the ways in which Burlington residents find use for things that might otherwise be deemed worthless. “You know, just because you don’t want this CD case doesn’t mean that it can’t be what someone else desperately wanted,” she reflects, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. Korenfeind is in charge of ReSource’s “ReCraft” department – a place where store items that aren’t getting sold for their original purpose are sold as art materials. She says that she often sees some of the community artists come in two or three times a day for new materials. In one of the youth programs that ReSource runs, Kornefeind helped kids craft hanging displays out of old records to show off the light bulbs they were selling. The bulbs are given away free with every purchase of a lamp by a low-income family. We discuss the benefits of having a secondhand store with so many initiatives in the environment, the community, and for social equity. “It’s all interconnected,” she says.

Disposal is perhaps the area of the materials economy where ReSource’s efforts have the largest impact. Through their various initiatives and multiple programs, they address numerous problems with disposal that don’t have established eco-friendly alternatives in the community. While Burlington has gone to great lengths to create a dependable recycling program for businesses and residents, and has even begun to remove organic matter from the waste stream through Act 148, their newest composting initiative. But dealing with larger items gets a bit more complicated. I encountered the difficulty in dealing with these items firsthand when I was moving out of my downtown apartment last summer. We had a couch that we had found on a street corner the previous year that we were no longer able to keep. We couldn’t leave it out on our street as the Department of Waste had informed us that we’d be fined $500. We’d posted about it online, but couldn’t find anyone who wanted it. Thrift shops wouldn’t take it, as there was a large coffee stain under the seat cushion. We had no choice but to take it to the landfill. This presented another problem – we had to move out of our apartment a week before moving into our new one, so our cars were already packed with our belongings with no where to leave them. There was no way to move our couch to the landfill unless we unpacked everything and left it in our former driveway (granted, we should have planned this whole thing ahead of time – after this first moving experience I think I’ve learned my lesson….) Eventually we found a friend of a friend who was able to take our couch to the landfill, and paid $25 for it to sit and decompose over the next hundred years. I’ve always felt terrible for letting that couch go to waste like that, but it just demonstrates how little we think about dealing with something we want to get rid of – I should have been making calls several weeks in advance to figure out what to do.

Saving refrigerators from the landfill is an important mission – especially older ones – as these refrigerators contain a cloro-floro-carbon known as Freon 113 or CFC 113. The future production of Freon 113 is now banned in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that it has disappeared by any means (there were 117 million pounds produced in just 1992!) (RRS). When left to degrade in a landfill, Freon is considered an ozone depleting pollutant and is a major concern of the EPA’s. Freon is often recaptured from older refrigerators and reused in new ones, but only if these refrigerators are recycled properly. Other large appliances present similar concerns to the environment, such as leaking pollutants and rust, not to mention that sending them to a landfill is simply a waste of raw materials. Consumers are encouraged to responsibly recycle their large appliances, but this is often a difficult process and can sometimes cost money. ReSource’s large appliance repair program offers an even more attractive alternative to recycling – giving these broken or run down appliances a second life. On their website, they write that in “2010, ReSOURCE’s Appliances repair service refurbished and sold o gave away 236 fridges, 234 ranges, 226 washers, and 169 dryers and serviced hundreds of appliances which may have otherwise gone to the landfill.” Not only is this a huge relief to landfills in Burlington, but residents benefit from not having to pay for their appliances to be recycled or search for a recycling facility, and other residents benefit from having a more affordable source for purchasing these appliances. The entire operation benefits the community immensely.

One of ReSource’s programs is a deconstruction service, which means that they will carefully dismantle a building or room, instead of demolishing it in the way that traditional construction services do. This alternative is far more sustainable as it allows homeowners to salvage any important pieces of the buildings’ infrastructure that can be reused in its reconstruction, or it allows ReSource to take these resources and use them in their Household Goods and Building Materials store. They offer “soft strips,” which are useful for the removal of large appliances, tiles, and lighting fixtures in single rooms as well. On their website, ReSource writes that the demolition of an average home (approx. 2,000 square feet) “can produce about 10,000 cubic feet of landfill debris.” They name the types of materials that can be salvaged and reused in a deconstruction as wood beams, joists, studs, baseboards, cabinets, cupboards, railings, brick, doors and casings, windows, bathroom fixtures, light fixtures, and furnishings. ReSource offers their deconstruction services at rates that are competitive with traditional demolition services, and advertise it as the “environmentally friendly alternative.” They list the advantages of their service, including providing new, stable jobs, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to the ReBuild store (which sells recycled building materials at low prices), and creates “substantial tax deductions for the property owner.”

ReSource offers a computer repair service as well: they are a registered Microsoft refurbisher and will repair computers at competitive prices. They often sell refurbished computers as well. The computer and technology industry is one that is extremely prone to change and adaptation. On one hand, this is exciting as it is a sign of progress – our technology is constantly becoming faster, smoother, better. But on the other hand, it is a huge source of frustration. It seems as though we are always trying to keep up – or in the words of a Verizon employee I spoke to last week about the new phones, “they come out of the box and already need an update.” ReSource aims to address this discrepancy by making computer repairs and operating system refreshers affordable and available. This way, people can fix their computers and keep them up to date instead of sending them to a landfill and getting a new one. The e-waste generated by computers is an especially grave waste problem, and keeping computers out of landfills will be an obstacle that we will continue to face as technology advances.

ReSource Burlington has re-defined the materials economy in Burlington to emphasize local, sustainable growth and reuse. Their programs offer very different alternative to the ways in which materials are “disposed” of. When one consumer is done with an item like a refrigerator or washing machine, ReSource takes the appliance, fixes it, and resells it to another consumer for far less money than a refrigerator would cost from the producer. And they do so by employing locals who struggle to find jobs, training them for more permanent, long term careers, diverting their materials from landfills and boosting the local economy. Yes, ReSource is still a store, and yes, it encourages you to buy their products, but they don’t advertise, they don’t push for nonstop consumption. I think that ReSource Burlington is a great example of an organization that has helped to #Unlearn consumerism in the Greater Burlington area, and I hope that their influence can spread to other organizations both in Vermont and beyond.

Works Cited:

”Computer Sales & Service.” ReSource. Repairvt.org, n.d. Web.

In Operation Since 2001 And Is Equipped For Full House, Deconstruction, Interior Softstrips And Anything In Between., and As A Certified Lead Safe Firm, Rebuild’S Deconstruction. ReBUILD Deconstruction Service (n.d.): n. pag. ReSource. ReBUILD. Web.

Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind. Digital image. Covanta, n.d. Web. <http://www.covanta.com/images/Covanta-Info-Graphic.png>.

“25 Stories for Our 25^th Anniversary.” 25 Stories for Our 25^th Anniversary. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2016. <http://www.resourcevt.org/25%20Stories>.

”ReSOURCE Celebrates City, Youth, Arts : Times Argus Online.” The Rutland Herald RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2016. <http://timesargus.com/article/20160131/NEWS01/160139959/1003>.

“Appliance Recycling and Metal Recycling Services.” Appliance Recycling and Metal Recycling Services. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2016. <http://www.responsiblerecyclingservices.com/Our-Services/Appliance-Recycling-and-Metal-Recycling.html>.

Interview with Alison Kornfeind, ReSource Employee. ReSource, Burlington. 07 April, 2016.

Caroline Kipp is a student at the University of Vermont.