Welcome to November, the month CJ officially turns 20! We will be celebrating our birthday and thanking you, our incredible supporters, for making our first 20 years of reuse so successful! Please stop by on November 12th for 20% off any purchase that day (that covers everything in the store!), some goodies, raffles and giveaways, and an opportunity to meet some of the organizations with whom CJ partners on a daily basis.
As part of the recognition of our 20th year of operation, CJ eagerly agreed to host Build Reuse’s Deconstruction and Reuse Conference. This is an annual conference held in a different city each year and attracts building material reuse retailers, work force development folks, deconstruction contractors, government, sustainability policy makers and architects. We had an attendance of 145 people representing approximately 26 states! Many of the attendees had not been to Pittsburgh before, and were highly complementary of our city. The attendees were wowed by the conference venue, Phipps Conservatory, and the tour sites, which included Construction Junction, Project RE_, and Millvale Food + Energy Hub.
We also wish to thank our local sponsor, Hydroblox, and our national sponsor, Amazon Paint – we carry both products in our store. A special thanks to the RK Mellon Foundation for providing local student scholarships to the conference.
We are very proud to be part of a national movement that looks to building material reuse as a global solution to reducing waste, and which promotes responsible consumption, job training and green design. We were incredibly happy to share not only our work, but the progress that our region has made when it comes to green building. Pittsburgh is home to 9 “green firsts”, 6 of which – the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh Glass Center, Phipps Welcome Center, Heinz History Center, WYEP radio station, and Point Park University Dance Complex – contributed materials to Construction Junction for reuse. If you care about these issues, we encourage you to support reuse operations like CJ, and you can also support our efforts nationally by becoming a member or supporter of Build Reuse.
This conference also connected the passion of the US movement to work being done in Europe, through our keynote speaker Dr. Elma Durmišević and the work she is doing as an architect to promote reversible design, what we call design for deconstruction, and her role in the 7-country EU pilot project called BAMB (Buildings as Material Banks).
I have said it before, reuse can be hard, but it is incredibly rewarding, and when you get in room full of people committed to the same vision of the future that prioritizes reuse over waste and the consumption of new materials and energy, it gives you the energy to work even harder!
