darkemeralds: Photo of Downtown Portland, Oregon USA in twilight (Portland)
darkemeralds ([personal profile] darkemeralds) wrote2014-03-11 09:59 pm

Portlandia 4 - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Redistribute

Here's the fourth of five visits to Portlandy things I love. We seem to have a theme of redistribution going on. Today I visited two favorite east-side reduce/reuse/recycle places.



The floor and corners of my former-but-now-demolished closet yielded up several bags of yarn. Craft-hobby-creative supplies are hard to get rid of because they have monetary and sentimental value. Even though I'm willing to let them go, I hate to give them away indiscriminately. That's why, even after the massive decluttering of Project Empty, my closet remained crammed with the stuff.

Recently I found a new and wonderful way to move it along. It's an operation called SCRAP Creative Reuse Center. Like the Rebuilding Center, it's non-profit and takes donations, which are tax-deductible. They take yarn, fabric, beads, little boxes, pens, paints--basically all kinds of little doo-dads that creative people can use for making stuff. And it's right up the street from me.

Scrap Creative Reuse Center in Portland, with their red-trailer craft gallery
Eleanor O laden with donations outside Scrap. The red trailer is a craft gallery


SCRAP is located in a grungy old light-industrial space, filled with bins and racks of oddball stuff. I saw a barrel full of never-used wine corks, one of pre-printed small cardboard boxes in their unfolded-up state, rolls of silver mylar tape narrow enough to knit with, buckets of crayons sorted by color...a strange array, donated by end-users and industry alike, thematically linked only by "wow, that's kind of cool! I could make something out of that, I bet..."

Bins of stuff at Scrap
Sign reading Re-Boutique at the entrance to the craft shop at Scrap


Barrels of stuff at Scrap including little white jarsMore barrels of stuff at Scrap, including rolls of skinny silver mylar
Stuff you find at Scrap


Two vinyl record albums turned into wall clocks at Scrap
One of the fun re-purposed object ideas in the Re-Boutique


The lady wearing cat-ears who accepted my yarn donation was happy to have it, and we spent a couple of pleasant minutes chit-chatting about the suddenly-gorgeous, perfect-for-bike-riding weather. A children's craft class was just getting underway so several moms and kids were filing in.

Later in the day I went to Free Geek, yet another non-profit where you donate stuff and they do good with it--in this case, electronic stuff.

The exterior of Free Geek in Portland on a sunny day, with a group of customers outside


I wasn't donating today, just looking for a particular adapter, which I found for three bucks. (It didn't actually serve my purpose once I got it home, so I guess I'll donate it back again.)

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