CalMAX Marketers

by Maggie Coulter

CalMAX's best promoters are its customers. This month's successful exchange highlights four women who are all helping to keep useable materials out of the landfill by promoting CalMAX and helping their schools, businesses, and communities at the same time.

Attraction: Magnetic Graffiti and CalMAX
A longtime user and supporter of CalMAX, Kay Norris has recently made another CalMAX connection. She operates Magnetic Graffiti, a magnet business, out of Willits in Mendocino County. The magnets are cut from sheets, leaving a by-product of magnet strips too small for the business to use. 

In November 2000, Norris placed an available ad for the magnets and has since made two connections. One of the connections is with a summer enrichment program for children in San Luis Obispo County operated by Cuesta College. The other is for Tenaya Elementary School in Groveland which will use them for arts and crafts programs for grades four through eight and 4-H youth. Both programs will be paying the shipping for about 50 pounds of free magnets. (See below for more information about these two connections.)

Norris also placed a wanted ad recently for lab tables. "Lab tables are a great contraption," says Norris, who has used them as work stations in her business. Although she hasn't made a connection yet for the tables, she did get a call from the City of Oakland asking if she needed other furniture. The Oakland caller also passed on the tip that the university sometimes has surplus worn or damaged lab tables. Norris is still looking for lab tables.

A year ago, Norris made a great ongoing connection through CalMAX for packing material. She saw an available ad placed by Freixenet Winery for tissue and butcher paper which Freixenet had received in shipments. "This was a great exchange," explains Norris. "They take the box that they receive their shipment in, take out the material they have received, put the paper and plastic bags back in the box and send it to us. We use the paper as packing material in our own shipments." This transfer happens about every three to four months. 

Norris says she reads all the CalMAX ads and then shares the information. "When I'm through with the catalog, it makes the rounds." She also tells other local businesses and her neighbors when she finds items that might be of interest to them. Lately she has been passing the word about solar panels and building materials.

Once Norris saw a CalMAX ad for available trees. A group in Willits was getting ready to do tree planting in public areas, so they held a fund- raising event to get the supplies they needed. She heard about it and put them in touch with the contact for the tree ad. 

Norris says she feels "fortunate to live a place of extraordinary natural beauty and limited resources, so it is important that we not fill in our lovely canyons with trash." CalMAX provides a way to do something useful with that trash, which is why Norris is very enthusiastic about CalMAX. She further explains, "I grew up without wasting things and nothing should be thrown out if it can be reused in any form. And certainly not if it can be listed in CalMAX!" Contact: Kay Norris

Artist Promotes CalMAX 
Artist Louette Quesnoy made one of the connections for Magnetic Graffiti's magnets. She checked the CalMAX online Web site, two to three times a week, saw the magnets ad and contacted Norris to get some samples. When the samples arrived, she showed them to her daughter's school principal who got very excited and ordered 50 pounds.

"I find it fascinating that there is so much stuff out there that is available at low or no cost," says Quesnoy who has found a number of items through CalMAX. She was living in Marin County at the time she made one of her "biggest and best" CalMAX discoveries: 400 quarts of leftover acrylic paint from a remodeling company in San Rafael. The company had been using the paint for cabinets. "It was some of the best quality paint I had ever seen--wonderful thick paint--and it was free." Quesnoy used quite a bit of the paint in her art and also gave a lot of it away to local schools for art classes.

"I tell as many people as I can about CalMAX," says Quesnoy. Recently she was in the local library in Groveland, where she now lives, checking the CalMAX Web site. Another local artist stopped by and she showed him an ad for some material that he was looking for. He did not know about CalMAX and was delighted at the discovery. The librarian had a similar reaction when Quesnoy told her about a listing for partitions on CalMAX. The librarian had been looking for partitions and was amazed that something like CalMAX existed and that she could benefit from it. 

Like Kay Norris, Quesnoy also spread the word about the CalMAX listing for free trees for public places. She even posted a notice at her daughter's nursery school in Larkspur about the free trees, and several parents followed up to get the trees and plant them at the school and on city streets. 

Because she is an artist, Quesnoy can find use for many items in CalMAX. She strongly supports keeping useful materials out of the landfill. "There is way too much stuff that is thrown out that isn't junk, that's useful stuff," says Quesnoy. And CalMAX is one way to get that stuff back into circulation.

Teacher Uses CalMAX to find Supplies 
Kerry Friend, coordinator for the College for Kids at summer school program, at Cuesta College is another recipient of Kay Norris' magnets. Friend's program will use the magnet strips in a multimedia art class. Like Norris and Quesnoy, Friend has also used CalMAX for several years. She first learned about CalMAX from San Luis Obispo County Waste Management staff who gave presentations to her seventh-grade science class (followed by an exciting trip to the local landfill!)

CalMAX online user, Friend has also found free binders for her community school students. As a teacher, Friend said she was always "scrounging for supplies," a vocation which has increased in her present position. She has found distance to be a barrier at times, because she sees many materials she wants to use but cannot travel to collect them. In one case she was able to bridge the geographic gap by passing on a tip to someone closer by. For example, she told her mother, who lives in Santa Rosa, about the same free trees that Norris and Quesnoy had discovered. 

Retired Recycling Coordinator Promotes CalMAX
Retired recycling coordinator Marcia Iannone has been using and promoting CalMAX since it started. She even has a CalMAX link on her own sites www.wormpoop.com, from which she sells worm composting supplies.

Iannone discovered CalMAX when she was working as Cal Poly Pomona's recycling coordinator until she retired in 1998. "I though it was wonderful that CalMAX was putting together a catalog and making it available to everyone," she explained, "so I wanted to spread the information about CalMAX as much as I could."

Cal Poly was one of the first colleges to set up a model recycling program, which was done with the help of CIWMB. Iannone used CalMAX to get used 55-gallon drums to place around the campus for recycling. Iannone also started her own reuse program on campus through which she coordinated the collection of reuseable items and made them available to students for their art projects. "At one time we had two rooms full of stuff that the students could use," said Iannone. "I am totally sold on the idea of reuse," says Iannone, she currently has listings in the CalMAX wanted section for cloth material, scrap wood, and books/notebooks. She is gathering these materials for use by her church for charity projects. One project involved putting together kits with baby supplies and toys, which volunteers made from scrap wood and material they got through CalMAX. When Iannone got all the material she needed, she then referred the callers to other contacts to help them with their materials.

Some of the CalMAX connections that Iannone has made include IKEA, which donated mattress covers; Corcoran State Prison which donated clothing and bedding that they were going to throw away; and the Chino Youth Authority which donated bags of torn and worn sheets, denim, shirts, and blankets.

Iannone also gotten supplies for her vermicomposting business through CalMAX. She got one ton of used wood from the ABC Window Company in Ontario from which she made worm boxes. She feeds the worms all of her household paper, fruit, and vegetable waste along with food waste she has collected from a local restaurant, dairy farmers, and from friends.

Contact information:
Marcia Iannone
8469-18th Street
Alta Loma, CA 91701 
(909) 987-2979 
miannone@earthlink.net 
www.wormpoop.com 

CalMAX Connections Home

Last updated: August 01, 2008