BRATTLEBORO — The soundtrack is the clink and tinkle of crockery and glasses being shelved, the clatter of pots and pans, the soft-shoe shuffle of sneakers on cement. On Saturday mornings the 20-by-60-foot shed is a beehive of activity.
Roberta Bremmer, a volunteer staff member at the Windham Solid Waste Management District's Swap Shop, estimates that the swap keeps from 500 to 1,000 pounds of material out of the landfill every week.
It's a winning trifecta: depositors don't pay to dispose of goods, browsers don't pay to take them home, and it's good for the planet.
The Swap Shop, at the end of Old Ferry Road, is a secondhand store where everything is free. The management wants you to take as much as you can, as fast as you can, as often as you like.
“Intercepting usable goods and materials before they hit the landfill is a cost-effective, socially responsible, and environmentally friendly strategy for reducing waste,” the solid waste district claims in its reuse directory publication.
wswmd Program Manager Cindy Sterling says the Swap Shop costs the district nothing. A state grant funded its construction, local businesses donated building materials, the Vermont Department of Correction's community service program participants built it and continue to maintain it, and six volunteers staff it.
Happy swappers
Dummerston artist Ahren Ahrenholz finds all the raw material for his sculptures at the Swap Shop and at Experienced Goods, the secondhand store operated by the Brattleboro Area Hospice.
One swapper who comes from Marlboro almost every week has found musical instruments here. Another, an Athens resident, brings her two boys on this Saturday in August to look for toys; they leave with books and a Hooked on Phonics game.
Annie Beach furnished most of her house with Swap Shop stuff. Clutching a chandelier in her right hand, she lifts the lid of an antique trunk with her left and peered inside.
“I think this is a treasure,” she says, half to herself. “I think I have to have this."
One dad brings his son and daughter to look around and leaves with a trampoline. Another woman comes every week with her puppy. “It's the thrill of the hunt,” she says, that keeps her coming back.
From trash to treasure
Volunteer Stewart McDermet, of Dummerston, started the Swap Shop after he went looking for a toilet at the landfill.
McDermet hates to see all the waste in this world - at home he even saves the twist-ties off bread wrappers. So it's only natural he's the type of guy who wants to comb the dump.
“Can I get in there and look?” he asked Jane Southworth, a waste district staff member who shared his passion for reuse. He figured others would share his interest.
The district allotted him a stretch of dirt near the weigh station where McDermet stood every Saturday morning. People started to drop off and carry away stuff.
Fred Wetherby's Mobile Homes and Transporting, of Winchester, N.H., donated an old house trailer, which McDermet gutted and lined with shelves. The district built the new shed when the Swap outgrew the trailer.
Yet McDermet hopes the hot spot he founded some 15 years ago will go out of business as soon as possible.
Manufacturers need to take responsibility for goods they produce from the product's birth to its grave, he said.
“We are working the wrong end of the cow,” McDermet says. “In one Scandinavian country, if they sell you toothpaste, the store has to take back the plastic wrapper, the empty tube, and the box it came in,” McDermet says.
Still, he doesn't expect to see the Swap Shop close down anytime soon. He suspects it will be the next generation to realize the value of reducing consumption.
“Things change slowly,” he said.
Spending Saturday mornings at the Swap is a busman's holiday for McDermet. As a self-employed building preservationist, he's used to saving doorknobs and window latches.
“That's why I like the Swap,” he says. “There's a lot of stuff I can use.”
Swap Shop donations have been increasing steadily because both the baby boomers and their parents are downsizing, McDermet says while hawking the merchandise as if he were earning a commission.
“Special on rubber ducks in aisle two!” he says to his customers.
Quality control
McDermet and the other volunteers - Roberta Bremmer and her son, Stephen Bremmer, Bob Henry, Hank Smith, and Jeff Dwyer - each work about 180 hours a year at the Swap, vetting each donation.
The volunteers allow no upholstered furniture, large appliances, clothing, tires, toilets, or mattresses. All moving parts must work. They shelve donations and help unload and load up vehicles.
Roberta Bremmer has set up a cardboard box to collect yogurt containers as a fund-raiser for the Guilford Fire Department. The recycler Terracycle pays a few pennies per container and turns them into planters.
Some of the swappers are themselves volunteers for other causes. One, a nurse with a cancer survivors' support group, looks for medical equipment for her clients. Lance Kemp, of Brattleboro, looks for bicycles for needy kids and furniture for seniors, which he delivers at no charge because, he says, “I like helping people.”
McDermet encourages people to offer their excess possessions directly to local nonprofit organizations before resorting to the Swap Shop. Places like Experienced Goods and ReNew Building Materials and Salvage, a nonprofit store that sells recycled and “green” building materials, can use the resale income for a good cause.
Some people bring a cup of coffee and a folding chair and spend the morning eyeing new arrivals, ready to swoop. Much of the merchandise doesn't even make it into the shed before a swapper intercepts it.
McDermet says it's very true that one man's trash is another's treasure.
“But we have too much stuff in our culture that we really don't need, knickknacks and such,” he says.
Going through somebody's box of worthless plastic junk is kind of sad, he says. But sometimes, at the bottom of a box, he'll find something somebody can really use.
“Then it's like walking along the seashore and finding a really pretty shell.”