Durham’s Scrap Exchange looks to the future

The Scrap Exchange is a little bit wild. But that’s what makes it magical.

The Durham creative reuse center is positioning itself to become even more so. The 25-year-old center is ready to embark on a decade-long journey to turn part of the Lakewood Shopping Center into a creative reuse arts district.

On two recent weekday visits, The Scrap Exchange was pulsing as people worked on sewing machines and dug through shelves of fabric, racks of stickers, and bins of craft supplies. They sat at long tables making crafts and shouted to their friends about what they’d just discovered and smiled wide when they uncovered something that set their creativity ablaze.

Ann May Woodward, executive director of The Scrap Exchange, had a drill on her desk next to her papers. She was wearing a metal necklace she had made and big, bold earrings which looked like they just may have been made from spare bike parts. She believes wholeheartedly in the power of reuse.

“It will feed you, clothe you, change your transportation, give you housing, it will fulfill all of your basic needs,” Woodward said. “That’s my message to people. That’s what I’m doing here. It’s a vehicle for anything that you can possibly imagine.”

And Woodward has a big imagination, which led the Scrap Exchange to buy 10 acres around the building for $2.5 million (they’ll close on the deal Aug. 10). They plan to convert that space into a reuse district that will include a maker space, a sculpture park, a recycle-a-bike program, artist studios and more.

As part of that plan, they also are opening a thrift shop in the same shopping center, where Thrift World used to be. The Scrap Exchange currently keeps 140 tons of solid waste from going to landfills yearly; the new shop will only increase that number. It will also give them the space to share all the rest of what they receive from donations, clothing, games, housewares and sporting goods. From 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Aug. 6, the Scrap Exchange will host Pop-Up Thrift, where all items will be sold for $1.

The center also takes donations beyond what can be creative reuse materials, including e-waste, said Madeline James, the Scrap Exchange’s deputy director, “We have a partnership with Triangle ECycling, so we are taking cell phones and computers and have guaranteed data destruction and then they refurbish them,” James said. The refurbished items are both donated and sold, and 20 percent of the profits of the latter go back to the Scrap Exchange.

Also integral to the Scrap Exchange’s mission is building community, both outside its walls and within. Chellie LaPointe, the center’s outreach coordinator, said she works to “get more people, kids and adults, to see the value of using reclaimed materials and how it challenges you creatively, frees you to use your imagination, empowers you and encourages you to see that whatever it is, human power can do it.” She works with off-site programs as well as ones in the center, sending out materials to more than 150 schools and organizations that use them to create items for events, such as parades and festivals. The Scrap Exchange itself has about 60 classes a year, along with several free craft-related meetups, including a community sewing group that meets every second and fourth Sunday from 2 to 6 p.m. LaPointe said this meetup is especially popular: “We get 15 to 20 people every event and it’s four hours long, so you can really get good headway on a good project.”

While the Scrap Exchange is working on several different fronts, they all come back to amplifying its focus of “defer[ring] waste for creativity,” Woodward said. “We’re growing it to include more materials, and more consciousness and education and more public policy and data.”

There’s a bike parked in her office, a nod to what she says is currently capturing her imagination, ensuring that the new district includes space for art bike rentals. Art bikes, for the unfamiliar, are, Woodward said, “kinetic pieces of art.” They are embellished to reflect the rider’s personal style.

“I’ve been to Burning Man seven times. Those are my people. That is my kind of city that I want to live in … when I think about what’s the greatest city in the world it’s Black Rock City (the city of around 70,000 that springs up around Burning Man each year in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada). And that’s what I’m talking about with this sort of district and what’s going to happen here.”

This story was originally published August 5, 2016 at 12:41 PM with the headline "Durham’s Scrap Exchange looks to the future."