Buffalo ReUse is a not-for-profit social enterprise operating in Buffalo, New York. We run a green demolition company, accept donations of all kinds of reusable materials and salvage items from buildings being demolished by other contractors. We operate a retail store, The ReSource, to make these materials available to the general public.

The ReSource is Access. It is an open door to affordable, high quality building materials and a support system for home owners. Buffalo ReUse’s ReSource is our retail destination for high quality building materials, environmental education and community activism. The store is located in Buffalo’s midtown, at 298 Northampton Street. It is nestled right on the border of the Masten Park & Cold Spring neighborhoods. It is just around the corner from Canisius College, Art Space, the Merriweather Library, the Buffalo Museum of Science and the newly restored Packard Building Apartments.

As part of our mission aimed at regenerating neighborhoods and empowering communities, the ReSource functions as our largest point of contact with the public. We serve predominantly an East Side customer base, but attract people from all over Western New York and nearby Ontario.

All day long, we sell high-quality building materials at very low prices, including many rare, antique or one-of-a-kind items. We also get plenty of new or nearly new items like what you’d see in the big box stores. Our prices and materials help people at all income levels stabilize and improve their homes. We also spend a great deal of time engaging in lively conversations with everyone who calls on the phone or comes into the store. We’re constantly connecting customers and local residents with Buffalo ReUse community programs, with each other, and with other resources they need and with government services.

The ReSource is now fully staffed and open six days a week, closing only on Mondays. Since November 2008, we’ve been using a computerized Point of Sale system, can take credit cards and can track sales in a far more sophisticated way than with our previous manual system. Pricing, always a challenging task, is stable, methodical and appropriate to our customer base.

Sales have been steady – in fact, our biggest challenge is to keep up the volume of material coming in the back door to match the material going out the front. Word of mouth continues to be an amazing source of materials and of new and repeat customers, though we’ve also been quite successful in gaining varied media attention to the store and our other community programs.

To increase the flow of material and find new sources, we’re reaching out to contractors, homeowners and anyone else who may have excess materials. We do pickup runs based on calls in to the store four or five days each week. This brings us some of our most desirable materials. If you’re interested in donating materials, check out our Material Donation page.

Our green demolitions continue to provide a much-needed source of low cost lumber, brick and stone which sells in impressively large quantities. We’re also salvaging materials, mostly the older stuff, from houses being demolished in Buffalo by other contractors.

We encourage everyone who hasn’t been to the ReSource, either ever in life or for a while, to come on down and talk with us. We’d be happy to discuss what we’re doing every day to help Buffalo ReUse achieve financial stability and to make the ReSource a true destination for not only shoppers but the numerous people interested in sustainability and those who are concerned about the state of our city and its most vulnerable citizens.