Sharon Robinson fields a lot of calls asking about fridges and car bumpers.
She’s the executive director of SCRAP DC, a “Goodwill for art supplies” in Brookland, but the Yellow Pages, she says, lists SCRAP under “scrap metal.”
“You get into some listing and can never get out,” she says, which leads to the calls asking if someone can drop off a truckload of bumpers or pick up an old fridge.
Often, it seems like bumpers and fridges are the only things SCRAP doesn’t take. As a creative reuse center, SCRAP’s mission is to take the things most people would call garbage—half-used rolls of Christmas wrapping paper, carpet samples, bottlecaps, broken necklaces—and puts them up for sale for 50-70 percent off retail to save them from the landfill. Teachers, artists and crafters save money on their art supplies and everyone wins. And because SCRAP carries not just yarn, beads, fabric, and crayons but also office supplies, wrapping paper, and greeting cards (often times new in the packaging), the store isn’t just for crafty types.
Robinson took on running SCRAP DC in October 2014, just over four years since it was originally founded as a roaming operation and a year after SCRAP moved into its current home in Brookland. She originally came to creative reuse while living in Portland, where the original SCRAP was founded by two teachers in 1999. “I mainlined SCRAP. It was wonderful.”
Nowadays, SCRAP receives 800-1,000 pounds per month of donated materials, and is able to sell nine-tenths of that, so saving 900 pounds of stuff from the landfill each month.
For now, SCRAP is based in Brookland, where “most of our traffic comes from people who live here, or have family here.” But, Robinson says, a move to the burbs, probably in Maryland, is not out of the question as rents in the neighborhood continue to rise. Yet on the other hand, she says, Brookland is “a very artsy area”—the perfect home for SCRAP.
Robinson let us in on some of the shop’s more notable goings-on:
Weirdest donation: “Someone called in one day and said, ‘I have embroidery hoops.’ I said ‘that’s cool,’ but the majority of them were for machine embroidery. Some were the oval shape of an old TV; these other things had a round part in the middle and all these spokes. I was like, sigh. They sat around, but someone came by and bought all of them.”
Best donation (recently): “50 pounds of beads. Swarovski crystals, real gold and silver wire. Sometimes it’s like a treasure trove, like you can’t imagine someone’s giving it to you.”
Biggest challenge: “Getting our volunteer pool back to what it was before.” (Note: if you’re interested in helping out you can show up for just an hour unannounced and help fold fabric or sort donations; there’s also more involved volunteering)
Still only envisioning googly eyes and pipe cleaners? Here are some of the things we spotted during a recent trip:
piano keys (25 cents each)
cardboard masks ($1.50 each)
a photo of a cat on a couch
fake-vintage postcards of male models from the 1970s, like Zoolander stepped into a time machine (these are no longer for sale because, duh, I bought them–for $2.50)
1990s-edition Trivial Pursuit
Dinosaur Mad Libs
A necklace made from a domino, depicting a Victorian pin-up model
Lego cupcake toppers
a large cardboard box full of plastic goldfish
A sewing pattern to make a Power Rangers costume (for a child only, sadly)
A “bonsai potato” gag gift
