Junk

by Alison Stewart

REGENERATION STATION,

  ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

  * * *

  “IT’S FREE REMOVAL for this gentleman,” Tommy tells Adam, who is driving the truck. Yes, he said free. It says so right on the vehicle, on the business cards, and on the website. Junk Recyclers of Asheville, North Carolina, has an interesting business model. Two uniformed guys will show up with a biodiesel box truck. If your stuff is just junk and not crap, they will take it off your hands and not charge you.

  Phillip is a repeat customer. He used the guys before when someone gifted him a hot tub that he found he didn’t use all that much. Those were better times and now his life is in transition. “I was married to a nurse and now I’m not, and I just can’t afford to be here.” His story sounds like a lyric from a country song. Phillip is soft-spoken and apologetic about some of the items because he knows the drill. He told them he has stuff worth taking away and now the Junk Recyclers team has to assess whether or not something is functional in some way. The guys in the field do their best not to appear judgmental, but it is part of the job. Tommy lays out the bottom line. “We’ll see what items he has and the quality of it, and if it is something we can take for free. As long as it is not damaged, not covered with pet smells or stains or anything like that, then we can take items like that, try to find them a new home.”

  Junk removal is only part of the equation when it comes to this next generation junk removal company. The name Junk Recyclers is a tip-off. The company repairs, repurposes, and upcycles items it removes from homes and businesses. The removals become inventory for a retail co-business called the Regeneration Station. The store full of used goods is in a twenty-six-thousand-square-foot former pillow factory warehouse three miles from downtown Asheville.

  So each removal job is a bit of a mystery. What will they find? Will it be salvageable? Can it be resold in the store? They’ve gotten really good at telling what has potential and what doesn’t. They’ve heard some tall tales. “Maybe we’ll get a ‘limited edition’ couch,” recalls Adam with a laugh. It has become the company joke. One woman tried to convince the pick-up team that her couch was unique and of great value because it was a “limited edition” sofa. It was just a couch the lady paid a lot of money for and was now in sad shape. They see the endowment effect—people placing unreasonable value on their things—all the time. That is not the case on this job. Upon closer inspection Phillip realizes some of this furniture is in less than desirable condition. He just wants what is still in decent shape to go to someone who might need it. He chose Junk Recyclers because of its repurposing reputation. “There’s something to be said for giving it away.”

  The final assessment from Tommy? “We were able to get a bookshelf, an old artillery crate, and a futon. The rest was too far gone. Too many chips.” The artillery crate was really cool. It looked like a rustic wood version of a toolbox plus stenciled in the corner was a little bomb with flames shooting out of the top. For a creative interior designer it could be that showcase piece on a bookshelf or an ironic objet d’art in a modern home or maybe it would be the perfect surprise for the longtime NRA member who has everything. The guys on the trucks have a keen eye for potential value. The store depends on it. By the end of the day the crate was on the sales floor at the Regeneration Station with a tag describing it as an “ammo box” and it could be yours for twenty dollars.

  Junk Recyclers offers to take away Phillip’s busted chest of drawers and broken shelves for a small price. The material could be recycled or sold to local artists. Phillip opts for just the free removal and thanks the guys profusely. But he did have a question. “Every time you guys come it is a different guy—are you a cult or something?”

  It isn’t a cult but a growing business with seven guys and three trucks. This self-contained junk ecosystem was the brainchild of thirty-two-year-old Tyler Garrison, someone who thinks about life and business a bit differently than most entrepreneurs. Nine years ago, Tyler decided he wanted to go off the grid. He needed to figure out what he really wanted in life. On the surface he seemed to be living large, running a software franchise in his home state of Georgia. “I had the quote unquote American Dream. I lived in the suburbs. I had a ridiculous salary for a twenty-three-year-old. I was married, then went through a divorce.” With his long hair, trucker hat, and scruffy goatee it is hard to imagine him as a nine-to-five kind of guy. “I made a fortune but I was just wasn’t . . . I was kinda . . . I was existentially discontent. And so after the divorce I just had this awareness I should just give everything away and backpack. I packed a pack. Closed down my bank account. Turned off my cell phone. Gave it away. Gave away all my possessions. I spent three and a half years just backpacking across the country.” He camped out. He took odd jobs. Hitchhiked. He says that when he needed something—food, a place to stay, a job—it always worked out. Objectively, he is hipster handsome, with the self-possession of someone who has had success, so his ability to make connections, grab a ride, and find places to stay is not that surprising.

  The experience was Tyler’s own version of the Aboriginal right of passage known as “the Walkabout” when young men at the dawn of adulthood wander alone into the wilderness to learn more about themselves spiritually and their own drive to survive. “Doing something like that—it became the journey. Life is a deeply internal experience and we tend to ID with external.” Material goods came to mean nothing to him. He actually believed he might spend the rest of his life as a “nomadic warrior,” but a chance encounter in Florida changed that. He went there to help out his then-girlfriend. Her grandma had passed away and her home needed to be cleaned out. There he met a guy he saw picking up trash on the sidewalks who would then sell the stuff out of his house. The guy explained that because there were so many snowbirds in the area often the items being discarded were barely used. “This guy was sharp. Not what you think. He was sharp. He told me he made 8K in a month. That’s real money—no employees, no tax. The main thing seemed fun. Simple. Doing something good for the Earth. All these wins.” Given the combination of his years living off his wits and his experience as a businessman Tyler saw an opportunity to create a new junk removal paradigm.

  Tyler moved to Asheville with a little cash in his pocket and a pickup truck he bought from the girlfriend’s dad. In 2010 he spent it all to get the company up and running. “I had five hundred bucks. Spent $70 on a storage unit and $430 dollars on an ad to run in the Mountain Express. It had to work or I wouldn’t pay rent that month.” He laughs now realizing that he hadn’t really thought it through.

  “For four months we had no company name. The first ad said FREE REMOVAL and that was it. And my phone number.” People called. He took the stuff and within a month filled up a ten-by-twenty-foot storage unit. Tyler advertised what he had for sale on Craigslist and then sold things directly to people who responded to the ad. It worked too well. By month number two he had to expand to a twenty-by-forty-foot unit. By the third month he had four of those units and by the end of the first quarter he had eight ten-by-twenty-foot units and a steady flow of customers. When he found himself digging through mountains of small appliances and climbing over piles of furniture to retrieve an item someone showed up to get he realized the truth. “I knew I needed another way to do this.”

  Another chance conversation led to an aha moment. “A seed is a funny thing to plant. A guy told me that Walmart gives away old buildings.” The guy was off a bit. Given the timeline, what the man might have been referring to was a movement to rehabilitate and repurpose abandoned big box stores like Walmart and K-Mart. Published in 2008, the book Big Box Reuse by Oberlin professor Julia Christensen highlighted the creative uses for these kinds of giant spaces left standing empty. Giant former retail spaces have become churches, libraries, town halls, and one was even turned into an indoor speedway.

  The conversation was a game-changing moment for Tyler in two ways. First, he knew he needed to find a large space for little money, perhaps some abandoned warehouse. Second,
he also decided he wanted to build the Walmart of well-made used furniture. He watched as people spent a couple hundred dollars to buy pressboard dressers. He wanted to find a way for them to spend the same amount of money on gently used but beautifully crafted pieces of furniture that would last. “What a neat concept, to be able to have this mega reused repurpose salvage thrift store. The problem with most thrift stores is if you want to furnish a home you have to go to a million of them. Places may have a couple couches, maybe a lamp; it may or may not work. Why not do a big furniture store where you can have forty couches and you can have fifty beds and tons of lamps? I felt like people would come from miles around.” He also tapped into the reality of the economy at the time. He started his company after the great crash of 2008. His point of reference is very different from other independents junk removal folks who got in early and had to adjust. He didn’t scale his business to meet the new economic reality. An ambiguous economy was the norm for him and a lot of people his age.

  “There are so many people who need to find ways to save money for their families. We’ve become so consumeristic. On one hand people don’t want to buy this throwaway Chinese-made stuff; on the other hand, our economy is not exactly booming right now, and a lot of families can’t afford to go buying a $3,000 living room set or a $6,000 bed.” There’s a little bit of unintentional Robin Hood in this model. He has inserted himself between the haves and the have-nots of the Asheville area. “The truth of the matter is the bread-and-butter of junk removal is really wealthy people. Is it only? No. Does everyone have junk? Of course. If you are on a fixed income or low income your first thought is you will load it in your Honda Civic and take it to the dump. I don’t think it’s the best choice, but if that’s what you got to do, I get it. So the bread and butter is the wealthier, more affluent folks. Someone whose rate is $300-an-hour and just says, ‘I just don’t want to do it,’ or ‘I work hard so I don’t have to.’”

  Junk Recyclers has a geographic advantage. North Carolina is home to some of the finest furniture making in the country. The removal guys often pull out some exquisite furnishings from even modest houses. The end result is the Regeneration Station often has pieces made of teak or mahogany with dovetail grooves, the kind of furniture that pricewise would be out of the question for someone with limited means.

  “There’s a lot of value of these items,” says Nikki Allen, the creative director of the Regeneration Station. She runs the retail side of the operation. “We wouldn’t have one without the other. It started as just a junk removal company and the Regeneration Station was the outlet to sell what the guys got from the clean outs. Without them we wouldn’t have the opportunity to recycle everything we can and do. It is a team effort.” A petite brunette who looks more like a teenager than a woman in her mid-twenties, Nikki’s gravity-defying ponytail swishes back and forth as she uses a push scooter to zip around the warehouse because it is so big. Her little dog, Bear, trails behind her. The enormous space is divided into sections with aisles that have street names. “I wanted to make this like a little town,” Nikki says of the design. It also helps her direct people to the different booths. For example, when you walk in the door you can take a right onto Abbey Road, which leads to Shakedown Street. You can keep going and intersect with Electric Avenue or take a right on Love Street. The industrial look of the warehouse, the corrugated steel walls and exposed lighting, is offset by some urban funk. Nikki had two graffiti artists spend a night in the building painting a giant mural on the far end of the building. They are now spray-painting one of Junk Recyclers’ trucks. Real vinyl records spin on an old player providing the background music for the store. It all goes to the vibe Nikki wants for the place. “I want it to be like a playground.” A retro, hipster playground.

  Booths are leased to likeminded local artists or upcyclers. You can find expensive pieces by people who are professional pickers, but most of the inventory is items from removals that have been upcycled by the team. Nikki is really good at reupholstering chairs. “We mainly try to keep things out of the landfills.”

  The term upcycling entered the mainstream in the 1990s. It means taking a used item and creating a new use for it, perhaps taking old shutters and refashioning them into a bed headboard, a table top made of old wood rulers, a bulletin board out of wine corks. There’s even an upcycling blog devoted to the things you can do with dryer lint. Apparently you can make modeling clay out of it.

  The credit for the term goes to a German engineer named Reiner Pilz who gave an interview in the mid-nineties where he criticized the way a certain business recycled. He said “Recycling. I call it downcycling. They smash bricks, they smash everything. What we need is upcycling, where old products are given more value not less.”

  Pilz would approve of the Regeneration Station’s third outpost, the Regeneration Station Studio. It is a workshop where Tyler and Nikki send pieces that need some extra attention or refashioning before they go on the floor. Nikki gets excited when one of the pieces comes back from being fixed. “One thing about the older furniture is it is made well. It is solid! I mean, this is going to last through generations. People are now starting to see the value in it.” North Carolina has been called the Furniture Capital of the World, and is home to some of the best woodworking from companies like Hickory and High Point. A former furniture pro who worked for several top shelf companies now runs the Regeneration Station’s shop. Nikki says Mike McCracken is the best. “He has been a woodworker for thirty-five years. He’s great. He makes anything you want. We do a lot of barn tear downs, we make furniture . . . well, he makes them.”

  I can hear the machinery from the parking lot and sawdust tickles my nose as I approach the garage. Inside is Mike, who is building an industrial-looking oversized lawn chair out of some wood shipping pallets. “If someone walks in here and says, ‘Can you do so and so?’ I will tell them, ‘I can build the Taj Mahal if you got the time and the money.’”

  One listen to Mike McCracken’s accent and you know his family has been in North Carolina since its founding, and he is proud of that fact. He’s been in the furniture business—selling, teaching, overseeing quality control, designing—his whole life. “All my years of furniture . . . I’ve worked at the very high end. . . . I’ve made stuff for Reagan. . . . I’ve made stuff for Bush. I’ve made stuff for Dale Earnhardt Jr.” He wants to show me a grand cabinet so he can explain how he determines the age and condition of a piece and, more important, how he is going to fix it. “Old furniture was big cases on little legs . . . you can tell by the style. This is definitely a [nineteen] forties or fifties cabinet. We’re gonna strengthen it,” he says, pointing to the areas that need help and makes two fists to show how strong it will be. He says he got it for nothing and he is ready to make it into something. “We fix it up. Repurpose it, make it presentable. Not going to be brand new now, but it will be functional and serve a purpose for someone looking for a bargain.”

  Even with all his years in the industry he does not turn his nose up at something that is broken or even something pulled out of a Dumpster. He likes the challenge, the creativity, and the freedom to do as he pleases with the material presented to him. Mike thinks the world is full of two kinds of people. “A guy walks into a room and sees it’s full of horse shit. The guy says, ‘Ooooh, wee, Oh Gawd, this room is nasty and terrible! I’m getting out of here.’ The other guy looks around and starts cleaning and says, ‘There’s got to be a pony in there somewhere!’ It is all how you look at things. I know I can make something out of it.”

  Asheville is an ideal location for a three-pronged business like this. It has a university and trailer parks nearby. It is a city that is a town. It is cosmopolitan and welcoming of tourists, but it is distinctly southern. You will drive down the Billy Graham Highway to get from one place to another. My rental car radio was preset to HIM radio, a contemporary Christian station. There are also neohippies grooving to drum circles in the revitalized downtown plaza. As Asheville’s reputat
ion as a livable city spreads, the more diverse the population becomes—and the needs are diverse as well. Nikki is a good example. “Asheville has a lot of transplants. People just come in their car. That’s how I got here—I packed up a car from Indiana.”

  This business is run by millennials and it shows. Nikki and Tyler have a Regeneration Station podcast. Junk Recyclers/The Regeneration Station post videos on YouTube. They advertise on Craigslist. If an artist uses something he finds in the salvage area of the store and posts it on Facebook, the artist will get a discount the next time he comes in. They count their customer base as being a lot like them. “Ballin’ on a budget!” is Nikki’s battle cry, but she thinks it really goes deeper than just a good deal. “People in our generation are not so materialistic. They don’t need the big houses, the material things. You’d rather just not have a bunch of debt. To have your own home under $30,000 now is actually more prevalent.”

  Asheville is an interesting mash up of the old and the new, the modern and the old school, the town and the gown. And it bubbles up among the staff from time to time. A couple of the junk removal guys are locals from just outside Asheville, and they have lived hard. One tells me of his time in jail for passing bad checks. He spent his life growing up in a trailer park near a meth lab. He is grateful to have this job and to be considered for promotions. Another hauler is a student at the university. He is studying sustainability. The clash of cultures is apparent one day when the subject turns to lunch. “The sandwich had gouda cheese . . . it was so good,” says the student. The local dude, Nathan, a thin, reed of a guy, takes a drags of his cigarette and says, “I don’t what the hell you are talkin’ ’bout.”

  “What is this?”

  “Is this right?

  “It said ask for Jonathan,” says a skeptical twenty-three-year-old Nathan in a distinct North Carolina country drawl. They negotiate Junk Recyclers’ truck into the small parking lot of an auto repair shop on an otherwise lonely strip of road about ten miles north of Asheville.