Celebrating 1st Year at our New Location!

This July, the Reuse Centre celebrates its one year anniversary since moving to its new location from the old downtown store. This was a big move for the store, and a much welcomed improvement. The new store is much larger, with plenty of natural light coming from the south facing windows, which brightens the whole building and creates a pleasant shopping experience for our customers. Compared to the downtown store, the new location also offers much more parking space for customers shopping or donating items.

We have received lots of positive feedback from staff, volunteers and especially customers since relocating. When accepting donations, the staff finds the larger area much more convenient to sort items and organize stock. Volunteers also appreciate the new space which has more room for sorting and more shelf space for the bins.
Over the past year, the customers have enthusiastically welcomed us into the new area. They have expressed great satisfaction with the new space, parking lot, and the Reuse Centre's expanded list of accepted items. Being situated in a residential, but still relatively central, area of the city, the centre is able to expand its goal of community outreach by being able to connect with more citizens.

In the future, we also hope to host in-house reuse workshops, programs, and reuse-related community functions within the new boardroom space. The Centre also hopes to be able to promote reuse in the city through building and developing partnerships in the community.

Our customer visits and amount of donated materials have increased since the move. Each month, we have been accepting about 19.5 tons of donations compared to about 12 tonnes per month downtown. At the downtown location, there were 9,062 total customers from January to June, while this year there has been 13,939 customers at the new location (Figure 1). In 2014, the Reuse Centre received about 69 tons of donations from January to June, compared to about 116 tons we have received so far this year (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Graphs showing the increase in the number of customers and the weight of donations coming to the Reuse Centre from 2014 to 2015 for the months of January to June.

If you have not been to our new location yet, be sure to stop by and see the new space for yourself. We have plenty to offer for your next reuse adventure!

- Lynnette (Staff)