The Hudson Valley Materials Exchange has a new home in New Paltz and its executive director says the move is an opportunity to embark on a new direction, not only preventing stuff from becoming garbage, but educating people about the inherent worth in surplus products ranging from storm windows to roofing tiles to art supplies.
Materials Exchange Executive Director Jill Gruber, who has been at the helm of the nonprofit for its entire 15-year run, said that while there are economic and environmental benefits to be derived from operations that divert surplus materials from the waste stream and back into use, there is even larger value in educating people to be wary about accepting the term garbage at face value.
The organization estimates it has diverted about 3,000 tons of material back into use. “That is material that would have gone to the dump and it is being returned to use, that”™s a value right there,” Gruber said. “But the primary focus where we are taking the organization is conservation resource education.”
She cited paper as a prime example of a resource-intensive product where simple steps can create significant conservation benefits. Paper of course, is easily recycled, but just using smaller margins is one way to use less paper, she said. Filling the back side of used paper for draft versions of documents halves the amount of paper a project needs, she said, an idea being adopted by the town government. “It is extremely conservable, there are a lot of easy ways to save paper,” Gruber said.
Resource conservation used to be viewed as possessing almost an antibusiness bias, but Gruber said that as costs have soared for common goods, business has been among the first to appreciate the wisdom expressed in the old saw, waste not want not. “We serve business,” she said, either by performing waste audits that help them redirect their surplus materials away from landfills and their tipping fees toward possible users ranging from artists to people in need of pallets, paint, kitchen cabinets or plastics.Â
“We serve the whole Hudson Valley, we have businesses that come to us from as far away as Westchester,” Gruber said. “Waste reduction is good for business because it saves money and they”™ll save resources. There is an immediate payback every time you conserve anything. Plus it is a very good image for a business to be green these days.”
The exchange has been housed for the last decade at Stewart International Airport in a warehouse filled with items donated by businesses seeking to avoid the huge cost of disposing surplus materials in landfills. After a waste assessment performed by Gruber, surplus material is sometimes sent directly to a new user or sometimes offered for sale at nominal prices at the Materials Exchange warehouse, but it is no longer treated as waste.
Despite the success of operations, the Port Authority refused to renew the HVME lease. While PA officials expressed support for the aims and operation of the exchange, they said they simply needed the space HVME occupied for expanding activity at the airport, which the PA took over last year.Â
The new home is now back where it was originally founded, in the town of New Paltz, at the recycling center on Clearwater Road. The leaner exchange has been ingeniously incorporated into the recycling operation itself, working at point of contact so to speak, where consumers part with their waste.
“It”™s working,” said Gruber of the organization”™s new home. She said that the nonprofit is saving $40,000 annually in rent it was paying at Stewart Airport and said the money will be put to better education programs and other outreach efforts. But meanwhile, she said the HVME is still intercepting useful material that was otherwise headed to the dump.     Â
