Lifecycle Building Center: Bringing impact through surplus building materials

Community Foundation donor Tyler Edgarton began his affiliation with Lifecycle Building Center (LBC) through a bit of serendipity. In 2014 when he learned that a film production tenant of his commercial real estate firm was planning to send building material from their sets to the landfill, he asked for a few days to come up with an alternative solution. Through his network he learned about LBC, a nonprofit that takes donations of building materials, appliances and home furnishings and redistributes them to primarily lower-income residents and nonprofits through its Reuse Center, located between Adair Park and West End. Since 2011, LBC’s Nonprofit Material MATCH program has donated free materials to over 200 nonprofits, and awareness about this community resource is growing. That first film-set donation Edgarton facilitated salvaged roughly 25 tons of lumber alone, and he says that re-purposing materials has now become much more common among production companies.

Edgarton has become a strong advocate for LBC’s mission and has served on its Board for five years, helping to lead the organization through a capital campaign that has allowed LBC to purchase and begin renovating its own building in Southwest Atlanta. “LBC uses solid business practices like tracking sales data to determine what sells best and targeting donations to those items,” Edgarton said.

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“Being even a small part of helping LBC grow into a strong nonprofit that’s making an impact in our region has been a great fit with my own personal commitment to sustainability and community impact.” – Tyler Edgarton, Community Foundation donor

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“Building materials with decades of useful life left are routinely discarded because people don’t realize they can be saved or how much positive impact they can have. Once people understand this, they can stop seeing these materials as ‘waste’ and start seeing them as a tremendously valuable resource.” – Shannon Goodman, executive director, LBC

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