1. What area or region do you service?

Urban Ore has two operational faces.  We are a disposal service so people can let go of unwanted but still-useful goods without wasting them, and a retail store where other people can find things they want at a low price. Many people with deep environmental consciousness are reluctant to buy new merchandise if they can find what they need used. We serve the San Francisco Bay Area - or as far as customers are willing to drive, which is sometimes a hundred miles or even more. We are also consultants who design zero-waste resource-recovery facilities both domestically and abroad.

2. Is your company a non-profit organization?

No. We are a regular for-profit corporation that deals in reusable goods.  We think we can both promote and provide the service of recycling and reuse while being a profitable retail endeavor.  As the world's resources are depleted, this type of for-profit eco-retail will likely become more common. 

3. Where do you buy your used materials? 

We pay for some of what comes in, but we pay only a small percentage of what we sell things for because we put a lot of labor into cleaning up people's unwanted things and making them presentable, then merchandising them and helping customers find what they're looking for. About 75% of the merchandise comes from community dropoffs. Folks will often come to us before going to the dump, where they will be charged a fee.  The other 25% of our merchandise is collected by the Outside Trader Department, which makes pickups in response to calls, and by our Salvage and Recycling Department. The salvagers save still-useful goods from being wasted even after people have paid to dump them at the City of Berkeley transfer station. They also convert un-resalable objects into commodities for recycling; they regularly send nonferrous and ferrous metals, and glass to market, and other materials such as ceramics to non-income-generating recycling. We want to recycle as much as we can figure out how to.

4.  What kind of employment do you have? Is it volunteer or do you have paid employees, and how many?

We don't have volunteers, just paid employees – about 30 at this point, although we may grow soon. They earn what the City of Berkeley calls a "living wage," with starting pay over $11.00 per hour including an income-sharing incentive, and with benefits that include paid vacations and fully-employer-paid health, dental, and vision plans for all fulltime staff and all their dependents.