One Million Miles Of Waste Diversion
Greetings Reuse Fans,
When you break it down to the very basics of Construction Junction operations, we essentially move stuff. A lot of stuff!
We move stuff from your house or job site to our “house”, CJ’s 100,000 square foot donation receiving, warehouse, and retail store here on North Lexington Street. We move stuff out of our trucks into our warehouse, then on to our retail floor, and then hopefully you move it back to your house, your restaurant or your client’s renovation project. It’s a lot of moving, so it takes a lot of people pushing, pulling and riding on a lot of what we affectionately call “conveyances” – dollies, pallet jacks, carts of various sizes and configurations, and a forklift. We have multiples of these so when one breaks there is another to take its place, but when the forklift breaks, well we have only one of those…
On this forklift breakdown, our forklift doctor broke the news that we had put the equivalent of 1 million miles on our trusty machine – that’s slightly more than two round trips to the moon just moving stuff around CJ’s warehouse! CJ was able to acquire our trusty Toyota over 12 years ago through a grant facilitated by our work with Habitat for Humanity. We were selling their material to support their mission, much the same way as we are doing now with Off The Floor Pittsburgh. That forklift is still one of the hardest workers here at CJ on a daily basis, and the only one to put in 7 days a week moving materials in the warehouse and assisting staff in load-ins and load-outs. We have certainly put it through some rigorous work stacking dorm furniture, moving pallets of stone, hanging Big Pour signs, and installing the aluminum can fish sculpture hanging in Aisle 1.
This forklift interruption also prompted the exciting staff discussion of repair and replacement of our other essential conveyances and this is where you might be able to help.
We need: sturdy plastic pallets, rolling carts, and heavy duty casters. We are, with the help of the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh’s welding program, going to be fabricating some of our conveyances – that’s why we need the casters. The plastic pallets are the critical base of our in house constructed “A” frames that hold the thousands of doors processed by our Goodwill trainees.
Help keep us moving! Email Missy mmongelli@cjreuse.org or Greg donations@cjreuse.org if you have any of the items listed above.
Thanks for supporting Reuse!
