Berkshire Habitat ReStore Overwhelmed With Unwanted Donations
The lot is under surveillance and the stores is considering cracking down on dumpers.
ReStore on Hubbard Avenue sells donated furniture, building supplies and home improvement materials to help keep bulky items out of landfills and to raise money for Habitat for Humanity.
But people have been dumping their unwanted items on the property without an appointment and sometimes after hours. That's left a pile of trash for the nonprofit to deal with.
"So people just, you know, came and even if it's closed, I personally catch several people in the camera out of hours," said ReStore general manager Alex Valdivieso.
Valdivieso has been the general manager for less than a year but says last summer was a big problem with dumping and with the weather getting nicer, people have started to come again to dump their unwanted items.
To help get rid of the waste, 20 to 25 teens are volunteering from Lenox High School to help fill dumpsters and clean up the lot that's now littered with items needing to be thrown away.
Valdivieso says he has two 30-foot-long trash roll-offs that will be filled this weekend.
"I will say like 80 percent of all the items that are outside was because dumping," he said. "People dumped there a lot and we just need to keep moving it some way, somehow."
The store has a rolloff that needs to be dumped once a month but he has been asking Casella to come more often because of how fast it's being filled up.
"At least three times a month. So we increase it most on the summertime and we try to push a little bit, you know, but we went for as, I said on an average ... it was like maybe 14 times a year," Valdivieso said. "We went up like 20, but just for summertime."
But hauling the trash more frequently is costing the nonprofit more money.
"It's going to be like at least a couple thousand dollars because this is out of schedule," Valdivieso said of Saturday's planned cleanup.
ReStore may have to start taking legal action if people continue to dump on the property.
"We never did it before as in terms of like just go to police and say, 'hey, listen, this is what they do,' and we didn't do it that, but I think we're going to do this to establish something," he said, so people know they cannot do it."
Valdivieso is asking that people make an appointment to drop off items and send the store pictures of what they want to donate to see if the store wants it.
"We have a donation line service, which is managed by a coordinator. So what they do is provide pictures of the items so they will get evaluated and checked on that and then we have two systems — one that you can drop off into the store and also we provide a pickup service," he said.
ReStore has a truck that goes out four times a week to different parts of the county and will schedule a pickup of items at no cost.
ReStore is open Wednesday through Sunday, 9 to 5; contact the store at restore@berkshirehabitat.org or 413-443-2106. Information on how to donate goods or schedule a pickup can be found here.
Tags: habitat for humanity, trash,
