The Green Project

The Green Project is largely known for our building materials warehouse store that diverts usable materials from landfills and puts them back into circulation in the community. We also teach and encourage good stewardship of our environment by supporting the mindful use of resources. We’ve been keeping materials out of our landfills since 1994 by accepting donated building materials and reselling them to the public from our warehouse store at affordable prices. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity, we are able to offer a tax receipt for materials donated by businesses and individuals. These are materials that have little to no perceived value to their current owners, and so would otherwise go to fill up our local landfills, which are already overburdened. The Green Project takes these materials and puts them back into the hands of our community members for one-fifth of new retail costs. The Green Project began in the Mid-City neighborhood as a volunteer paint recycling group. Almost everyone has a partial can of used paint in their shed or garage. Our founder, Linda Stone, along with her neighbors, knew that it shouldn’t be poured down the storm drain or put into the trash. Seeing a need for a responsible alternative to dumping, they sought to create a place where paints could be recycled. In doing so, they created the first and only paint recycling facility in the Gulf South. The effort later expanded to include building materials of nearly every type. Today, we reclaim approximately 6 tons of materials a day and keep over 40,000 gallons of hazardous paints from our bayous, wetlands, lakes, and river each year. Our other focus is to develop a culture of reuse through education efforts and outreach in the Greater New Orleans area. To do this we have developed a number of programs and curricula to teach and excite people about both the environmental and personal benefits of reuse and recycling. We have developed programs and activities targeted at K through 12 school populations as well as presentations for adults that are available to neighborhood, church, and other community groups. We conduct workshops at our warehouse facility on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of each month that cover a variety of environmental sustainability issues and practices. Our purpose and mission is to build a culture where materials are used to their fullest extent rather than sent to the landfill after one use. The Green Project does this by creating a vital hub of resources that echoes our core values and imparts lasting sustainability community wide.