I checked out Film Biz Recycling‘s warehouse today in Brooklyn on President and 3rd Ave. Eva Radke, founder and visionary, gave me a tour of the place. Film Biz Recycling collects all the props and materials from film sets and offers it up for sale. You’ve got a great selection of cool stuff, from tables to lamps, carpets to antique signs.
The defining thing about the place is how well it is organized and presented. It isn’t depressing like a thrift shop. Things are displayed in an organized and pleasing way, obviously a result of Eva’s former production experience.
These things are also not ragged hand me downs, unwanted items from a consumer society. These things were bought to make a dream – a movie – and as such were never used. They are brand new. Even the ones that look old are simply playing their movie role. There is a feeling of glamour in each item and the overall feel is a hip boutique of odd ball items.
Unlike Build It Green, another place for finding salvaged stuff and which has more building type things (toilets, beams, appliances), Film Biz Recycling is more interior design related. But that is only a broad generalization, since what they have really depends on what films are wrapping up at the moment. If there’s a film out there about a carpenter you can bet Film Biz Recycling has a lot of wood shop stuff in it’s future. A film about baby’s, expect to find some great deals on baby strollers.
It is definitely worth checking out. The reason Eco Brooklyn is interested is that we build our New York brownstones exclusively with salvaged materials. So we are constantly on the look out for salvage streams. Film Biz Recycling is definitely another go to place in our daily harvest of salvaged materials.
As a New York green contractor, salvaging is a full time job for us. We have a guy who spends pretty much the whole week driving around sourcing salvaged materials. So allies like Film Biz Recycling are valuable to us in helping us streamline our salvage sourcing work.
I also like their web site. It is very much a web site of our time and really just a place page that links to the various social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flikr….the site reflects a cutting edge way of looking at the world: that we are all connected, and this is really what Film Biz Recycling is about.
There is no such thing as trash in a world where we are all connected, just things that need to be passed on. The moment you forget that, you break the web and the results can really screw with the ecosystem.