Welcome to Part III of a three-part series about Circular Philadelphia leadership’s trip to Texas as part of several Circular Cities trips to learn more about how different American cities are approaching circularity in an effort to share knowledge and learnings in making the transition to a circular economy. We’re excited to bring you our learnings from Houston, and we thank the Claneil Foundation for their support of this project. If you haven’t read it yet, you can read Part I of the series about Austin here and Part II of the series about San Antonio here.
With San Antonio and Austin in the rearview mirror and the sun finally out, Nic and Sam battled through Houston rush hour traffic and made it to the incredibly adorable Montrose neighborhood just in time for dinner. Montrose is considered one of the most LGBTQ+ friendly neighborhoods in Houston and that’s very evident in the pride flags and rainbows hanging from many homes and businesses. But what made Montrose adorable, albeit in a bizarre and quirky way, was the notorious lack of zoning in Houston.
As Nic and Sam walked to dinner, they passed a federalist brick house that could have been in Washington, DC, a Chicago-esque stately rowhouse-style walkup, an art deco villa fit for South Beach and a little colonial cottage straight out of New England. Add in that the Chicago-esque home was directly connected to a dog kennel, and you get the idea on how zoning works in Houston. But the chaos was charming, and Nic and Sam treated themselves to a family-owned Mexican restaurant that ticked off another box of great food on the trip.
Meeting the Circular Tour Guide
The next day started early with breakfast at Barnaby’s Cafe, a roadside joint that looked like a Vermont cabin. In keeping with the culinary journey, Sam finally got her chorizo breakfast tacos and Nic sampled yet another southern biscuit, which was delicious. They made it in time to pick up Keith Koski and begin the day at the City’s Building Materials Reuse Warehouse. More on that site later, but first a little on Keith.
Nic and Sam were first introduced to Keith by Austin’s Maddie Morgan when they thought the trip was just going to be Austin and San Antonio. But straight away, Maddie was adamant that they meet Keith and check out what’s going on in Houston. Keith started his career in the building trades, but with a well-rounded, generalist mindset that lended itself to thinking deeper. (At one point in the tour he in passing dropped the morsel that he used to do a little street theater back in the day.) While on a job renovating an airport in South Florida, Keith was appalled by the amount of waste that was going into the dumpster.
So he returned to Houston where he had grown up as the son of an Air Force officer and decided to do two things. The first, in keeping with his renaissance-man vibe, was to build his own house using a lot of reclaimed materials. The second was applying for a job to manage the City’s newly established Building Materials Reuse Warehouse. He almost missed the call for the final interview because he was so busy building his house, but thankfully, he took the interview and got the job.
The first place on the list that Keith wanted to show us delved deep into the circularity work that has been going on in Houston for decades. The Houston Furniture Bank was founded in 1995 by yet another stalwart of the Houston circularity scene, Oli Mohammed. Born in Bangladesh, Oli studied political science and took a job in Kenya with the UN. While working in a homeless shelter for refugees, Oli saw the drastic need for not just getting people homes, but furnishing those homes to provide some dignity after such harrowing experiences.
In time, Oli made his way to Houston where he founded the Furniture Bank. Like many nonprofits, it struggled to establish itself in the beginning. But after taking his board to a talk by a Bangladeshi economist in 2007, they decided that they could grow quicker through micro-financing. This newfound funding allowed the nonprofit to better establish operations, and in 2012, they received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to focus on mattress recycling.
Today, the Houston Furniture Bank serves 1,200 families and gives away over 17,000 pieces of furniture through 82 organizations that work to get low-income families into supportive housing. Aside from their 75,000-square-foot facility acting as storage and showroom for furniture, they also have a full-on mattress recycling operation where mattresses are first checked for resale value and if possible, cleaned up and sold. If the mattress is not fit for resale, it is disassembled for the wood, metal and fabric and recycled. They employ 35 people and work with Koski’s Building Materials Reuse Warehouse to drop off and take furniture to keep them in the cycle.
From Rags to Riches
The next stop took the tour to the industrial Port of Houston. As was explained to Nic and Sam by many people, Houston’s growth has been staggering over the past two decades, and much of it can be attributed to their positioning as the gateway of goods to the South. This was on full display at International Rags Ltd where they met owner Amirali Momin. Amir opened the 101,000-square-foot facility in 1993 as one of the early waves of Pakistani entrepreneurs in the business. If you’ve read the first post in this series about Austin, you may remember the trip to Josco. On that tour, CEO Colleen Halbrook mentioned that the industry for second-hand processing of rags was dominated by Pakistanis, and Amir confirmed that to be true. Not only are about 80% of Houston’s 35 second-hand clothing dealers Pakistani, but the entire industry now seems to be based in Houston. When asked who was the first to set up shop, Amir very nonchalantly said, “Me.” So Nic and Sam were meeting the originator of the Pakistani secondhand textile market in Houston.
But having “rags” in the title is a little misleading. Basically, like at Josco, everything that is not sold at the major second hand clothing dealers such as Goodwill and Salvation Army is sent to these facilities in Texas. Every day, 40,000-50,000 pounds of clothing come in to be sorted by the 70 employees that work at the facility. Amir’s operation is really tight. Clothes come in through one end of the warehouse. They are then sorted by gender and type (e.g. men’s pants, women’s blouses, etc.). The textiles are then put in barrels on carts to be sent to the second sort for size and textile fabric.
From there three more sorts happen. Amir employs a vintage seller who has contacts with New York City vintage buyers and sells a small portion of textiles to them. The vast majority is bundled up and sent to either South America or Africa. Whatever is beyond sale is turned into rags. However, some items like jeans go to domestic recyclers (in places like Arizona). Although fast fashion and low quality control have caused many of the international markets in Africa to accept lower grade clothes that still can’t be sold and cause waste problems in those countries, Amir uses a mix of quality control and direct relationships with buyers in Africa and South America, rather than going through brokers, to try his best to sell quality goods to developing nations.
Keeping with fashion, Keith then took the tour to Magpies and Peacocks for a lunch meeting with Founder/CEO Sarah-Jayne Smith and VP and Director of Communications Ahshia Berry. Whereas International Rags deals with vast volumes of discarded clothes, Magpies and Peacocks takes a fashion house approach to textile reuse. As both are transplants to Houston (Sarah-Jayne by way of the UK and Ahshia from Brooklyn), they saw a need for fashion and textile reuse to intersect. Magpies and Peacocks works with major brands and companies to achieve this mission.
One example is a strategic partnership with Southwest Airlines to take seating leather that is replaced on airplanes during upgrades and fabricate extremely attractive leather garments. One such engagement was requested by Hollywood stars who wore blue for prostate cancer awareness at the Blue Jacket Fashion Show in NYC. Another example was a strategic partnership with Houston First (the city’s marketing and tourism arm) to turn excess sports and conference banners back into merch that can be sold to fans, conference goers or gifted to visiting VIPs.
Along with the team’s (but especially Sam’s) excitement with seeing the fabric storage area, fabrication studio and the showroom, Sarah-Jayne and Ahshia treated the tour to an incredible lunch in their cafe, which they set up to serve their clientele. Sitting around the long vintage table and eating fajitas (yet another check off the culinary requests), it became apparent that a mix of dedication to circularity and being consummate hosts was a key to the success of Magpies and Peacocks (so please check out their online store if you’re in the market for a secondhand piece of fashion made with love and care).
Making Reuse Fun and Cool
After lunch, it was just a hop and a skip down to the Texas Art Asylum and the Houston Center for Creative Reuse to meet Ramona Brady who founded the establishment in 2010. After her grandparents passed, Ramona and her sister couldn’t just throw away the treasures that their grandparents spent a lifetime collecting. So she opened the space as a for-profit and nonprofit operation where goods are collected through the Center for Creative Reuse and then sold to the public through the for-profit Art Asylum. Ramona set up this business model because she did not want to take grant money, which is often tied to oil money in Texas. So in a stroke of savvy, Ramona has incorporated Etsy sales in addition to in-person sales and is about to hire a full time Etsy person.
But her commitment to the community is not hindered by the need to make money. Her team also offers steep discounts to Houston teachers to buy art supplies that the Center receives. This is a major contribution to, like many urban areas, an underfunded school district where teachers are often asked to supply many of their own materials. To date, the Center for Creative Reuse in conjunction with the Art Asylum have diverted over 2.7 million pounds from Houston’s landfills (and boy are their arms tired!).
With the day coming to a close, and somehow the rain holding off, Keith wanted to take a quick pitstop to the City’s building permit office to meet Steve Stetzler. While Houston developers and contractors have to wait for what is often the unpleasant task of obtaining a building permit, Steve and his team set up an entire Green Building Resource Center where people in the building trades can learn about everything from renewable energy installs to green roofs to zero waste for the building trades. Steve was particularly interested to show Nic and Sam their zero waste exhibits and explain how he is fighting the good fight to make more of his departments’ engagement events zero waste. As always, it’s refreshing to see that dedicated circularity and zero waste professionals like Keith have allies throughout city government.
And finally, it was time for Keith to show us his second love (after his wife) the Building Materials Reuse Warehouse. For some context, Nic and Sam had actually met with Keith’s team when they first flew in the previous Monday. It was a true pleasure to meet Director of Waste Management Mark Wilfalk and Houston’s Recycling Director David Vasquez. The meeting was a candid and enlightening view into the challenges that a major city system funded by the city’s general fund rather than an enterprise system (where residents pay an extra fee for waste management) faces to manage waste. However, their dedication to teamwork and innovation was what inspired people like Keith to keep making progress in his corner of the world.
And this corner was extremely impressive. Situated at one of the City’s Recycling and Depository Centers (equivalent to Philly’sSanitation Centers), the Building Materials Reuse Warehouse is positioned on the other side of the facility across from where residents can take recycling, waste and yard brush. The Building Materials Reuse Warehouse was started in 2009 by Houston’s Sustainability Department as a place where entities from local contractors to large corporations can take used building materials and furniture.
Along with many sinks, windows and doors that were at the facility, there were also dozens of rolls of carpets dropped off a few weeks earlier by the company that managed the College Football Championship in early January. It’s then Keith and his team’s job to organize everything and have it prepared by the many area nonprofits, many of which overlap with Houston Furniture Bank clients, to be used in affordable housing projects. Only 501(c)3 organizations that have registered can take the materials.
And just as the tour was wrapping up, a young man came to the center asking how his youth football nonprofit that also volunteers to help families of lower income players fix up their houses as extended service could sign up. It was remarkable to watch Keith put the man at ease by explaining that it’s a simple process that he would be happy to help him through.
With the rains coming again and a reservation at a Lousinana-inspired restaurant beckoning, Nic and Sam took their leave and went about their last night in Texas. But aside from bellies full of great Texas cuisine, both their heads were filled with incredible examples of circularity that they will be sharing with their board, membership and through this series with the general public. We hope you’ve enjoyed it and we can’t wait to use these examples to help shape Circular Philadelphia’s future work.
If you missed Parts I and II of this series, you can ready about the Austin leg of the trip here and the San Antonio leg here.
Leave a Reply