Trash into treasure: Eco-friendly junk removal company

 Posted on September 7th, 2022.

An antique treadmill, ornate wooden cabinets, and enough furniture to decorate a new living room.

A basketball hoop, a wheelchair, and stacks of old board games.

On Wednesday morning, these were just some of the salvaged items in the warehouse on Burbank Drive where co-owners Bradley and Jessica Menard run their new franchise of the national junk removal chain Junk King.

“It’s really dedicated to keeping stuff out of the landfills,” Jessica Menard said. “About 60 percent of what we bring in, we try to repurpose, donate, give to those who need it.”

The Toledo branch of Junk King opened for business in mid-June, servicing the entire metro area. The Menards have already hired a full-time team of three to help them with the labor-intensive job of helping local residents take out their trash — and then making sure to donate or dispose of it in an eco-friendly way.

“We took 2,300 pounds of metal to the recycling center yesterday,” Mr. Menard said as he walked past piles of sorted cardboard and plastic bottles.

Mr. Menard’s own parents owned a recycling business, which was an inspiration for him as he took on this new venture.

“I grew up in a scrapyard,” he said.

People hire junk removal companies for a number of reasons. Junk King will pick up old hot tubs, couches, sheds, play structures, televisions, and even yard waste such as branches and leaves, which they send to be chipped up into mulch.

They also help businesses that are in the process of renovating their space; a recent job involved picking up old equipment from a dentist’s office and sending the examination chairs to be donated.

However, most of their customers are either downsizing themselves or helping older family members move out of their lifelong homes, Mr. Menard said.

Lisa Berg, who lives in Jacksonville, FL, recently hired Junk King to help her 82-year-old mother clean out the Toledo home that she had lived in for 46 years.

“She’s never moved before, so it was going to be an emotional and physical and exhausting journey,” Ms. Berg said. “It was an unlivable house. My mom shouldn’t have been there probably the last five years.”

Ms. Berg flew up to Toledo in mid-July to assist with the job, as her mother prepared to move to Jacksonville. She found Junk King through a quick Google search on the day she arrived in Ohio — after she called, the Menards were there at the house the next morning to start the process.

Although emptying out her childhood home was bound to be a “traumatic experience,” Ms. Berg said, Junk King was able to lighten the load – both physical and emotional – on her family.

“All the way through, [Mr. Menard] was following up with me,” she said. “He understood the emotional aspect of it. It wasn’t like he was detached from the whole project…the sensitivity was just beyond.”

The job was split into phases. While Ms. Berg was in town, Junk King did a “total clean-out” of the house over two days, even carrying two refrigerators filled with expired food up multiple flights of stairs from the basement.

Ms. Berg added that her mother cannot walk up and down stairs or lift any objects, and so having the help of a junk removal company was “such a weight off my shoulders.”

At her request, the still-usable furniture was donated to Habitat for Humanity, while items like clothing went to the local nonprofit Sylvania Area Family Services.

Just in this first portion of the job, Mr. Menard estimated that his team removed 12,000 total pounds of items from the house. Soon, he said, they will return to the home to gut it entirely and prepare it for sale, removing every last curtain.

“This was all their childhood stuff, their childhood memories,” Mr. Menard reflected. “The woman who lived there, I mean, it was everything she had accumulated her entire life, so there was a lot of being sensitive about that and helping them to navigate that…that’s one of the rewarding parts of it, but it can also be challenging too.”

Pernell Horton, who owns another local junk removal company called Horton Hauls Junk, said that he often helps families who are sorting through “30, 40, 50 years of stuff.”

Many of the clients that seek out junk removal services are elderly and cannot physically handle the work, he said. Even for younger people, though, these types of tasks can be far too overwhelming and time-consuming to do alone.

“People just don’t have the time anymore, so it’s easier for someone like us to just come in and haul it out,” he said.

Like Junk King, his company tries to donate as much as possible to groups like Goodwill, Salvation Army, and Habitat for Humanity, finding unique ways to repurpose what they collect.

Mr. Horton shared that he once salvaged a vintage stereo console, putting it on Craigslist to avoid throwing it out. The stereo was purchased by a man visiting from South Korea, who then brought it on a plane back to his home country.

“It’s the old adage, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” he said, laughing.

According to Ms. Menard, Junk King is in the process of expanding its partnerships with community organizations and charities in order to donate even more of what they collect.

Mr. Menard added that they are trying “to get rid of the stigma that we just have a bunch of garbage.” Most of what they receive is entirely usable, he said.

Recently, he said, they found an old brass spittoon on one of their jobs, which they then gifted to a friend who runs a food truck. It’s now used as a tip jar.

“Something that was in somebody’s garage that they were getting rid of really meant something to somebody, so that’s the kind of stuff that we really enjoy,” Mr. Menard said. “We don’t want to be known as just a junk business.”

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