History

SCRAP was founded in 1998 by a group of teachers who wanted to find a home for their leftover classroom materials. They brought these materials to A Teacher’s Space, a resource center for Portland Public School teachers, and left them on a table for others to use. In 1999, an innovative teacher named Joan Grimm got together with a handful of her peers and received a grant from DEQ to open a small creative reuse center for the community. Located first inside The ReBuilding Center and then on N. Williams, SCRAP moved to its current location on NE MLK in 2009. In 2012, SCRAP diverted over 129 tons of usable material from the waste stream—an increase of 13 tons over the previous year. SCRAP now has four satellite locations across the country as part of its SCRAP USA program, including in Denton, TX; Humboldt, CA; Washington, DC; and Traverse City, MI.

SCRAP store and our old pickup van, Truckie, on N. Williams.