BEST Award winner, 2009 – Sustainable Products or Services
ReFind Furniture designs and handcrafts environmentally sustainable, natural, contemporary furnishings for residential and commercial spaces. Working exclusively with materials reclaimed from deconstructed Portland-area homes, ReFind’s goal is to preserve the environment and benefit communities.
ReFind Furniture was initiated in the winter of 2001 both as a means of providing employment for some of our deconstruction workers during a slow time and to demonstrate ways to reuse rather than recycle even the smallest items.
ReFind Furniture is a service of The ReBuilding Center of Our United Villages. Our United Villages mission is to inspire people to value and discover existing resources to strengthen the social and environmental vitality of communities.
ReFind provides social and environment benefits through two core programs:
ReFind Furniture designs and handcrafts environmentally sustainable, natural, contemporary furnishings for residential and commercial spaces. We create functional, artistic products from raw materials that would otherwise have been considered waste--short pieces of 100-year-old lumber, paint-coated strips of detailed trim, discarded cabinet drawers, weathered window sashes, and an eclectic mix of hardware and other items.
Ninety-nine to 100% percent of the materials used to build each ReFind Furniture item have been reclaimed, diverting tons of construction and demolition waste from local landfills. During the 2008 calendar year, ReFind products created from salvaged material saved the equivalent of over 60 Douglas fir trees from being cut down.
ReFind also collects clean sawdust generated in the shop and donates it for reuse in gardens, chicken coops and even to a co-worker for her guinea pigs. Mill ends that cannot be reused are recycled.
Our United Villages established The ReBuilding Center and its service, ReFind Furniture, both to secure a permanent funding source for our community enhancement work and to demonstrate how a group of everyday people can turn a wasteful practice into a public asset with significant social, environmental, and economic benefits to local communities. Functioning as an integral service of The ReBuilding Center, the work of ReFind Furniture facilitates Our United Villages community building work in local neighborhoods.
Additionally, Our United Villages provides a livable wage including full medical and dental benefits to all employees.
Our classes and workshops provide social and community benefits by helping participants tap into their creative imagination – seeing new ways to reuse old things. During 2008, ReFind hosted 40 workshops for 460 students and a total of 202.5 class hours. Eleven free community workshops were provided for 200 participants from organizations including: Big Brothers, Big Sisters, The Multi-Cultural Senior Center, Giving Tree, The Native American Youth and Family Center, and others.
