Houston Center for Creative Reuse

The Center for Recycled Art receives donations of clean scrap and reusable art and craft supplies from Houston’s citizens, businesses and industry. These donated materials can range from items that have no monetary value (bottle caps, scraps of fabric and empty carryout containers) to items of greater value (full skeins of yarn, unused oil paints and artist tools). These materials lend themselves well to creative reuse projects, and we weigh, sort and store these materials for use in our various programs.  Since its inception in December 2009, the Center has diverted more than 60,000 pounds of reusable materials from Houston’s landfills.

The Center also educates the general public about the creative reuse of waste materials through workshops, educational field trips and in-class presentations.  Through our Teacher Store program, the Center makes materials available to public school teachers and other nonprofits for use in their own creative reuse projects at extremely low cost, at present sold by volume for $5 per paper grocery bag. From the Teacher Store, we also distribute binders, file folders and paper trays at no cost to shoppers and without limit on the number each person may take.

We hear over and over how the teachers who have already benefited from our Teacher Store program use our materials on to create amazing projects with their students, as the attached photos show.  Your donation will help us reach more teachers and distribute more materials into needy hands.