Environmental contrast - thriving nature vs industrial waste

The Great Reclamation

A Manifesto for the American Mall

By Jason Pierce, Founder of Upcycle Hub

Read the Manifesto

1,500+MALLS DYING

12MTONS FURNITURE WASTED

80%TO LANDFILL

14¢PER DOLLAR

1,500+MALLS DYING

12MTONS FURNITURE WASTED

80%TO LANDFILL

14¢PER DOLLAR

The Photographs

In 2001, I was a garbage man in Marin County, one of the wealthiest enclaves in America. Every day, I hauled away the discarded evidence of the American Dream. I saw items still in their original packaging, high-end furniture, and electronics with years of life left in them heading straight for the burial ground.

The moment that changed me wasn't a piece of furniture. It was a box of family photographs.

I watched a lifetime of birthdays, weddings, and graduations get dumped into the landfill. Someone's entire history, discarded because there was no system designed to value it. That was 25 years ago. Since then, I've spent nearly two decades behind the wheel of trucks, hauling construction debris, moving household goods, and seeing the massive, broken plumbing of our waste system from the inside.

I've seen enough. It is time to stop mourning the death of the American mall and start using its bones to fix the way we live.

Birthdays

Weddings

Graduations

Grandmother's dresser

Family photographs

The Infrastructure of Extraction

America built over 1,500 enclosed shopping malls between 1970 and 2015. They were sold as "community hubs." They were sophisticated extraction engines.

Now, as e-commerce and shifting habits hollow out these "temples of consumption," 25 to 30 percent of them are projected to close by 2030.

Simultaneously, we are drowning in our own abundance. Americans discard 12 million tons of furniture annually. 80 percent goes directly to landfills.

We have a massive real estate problem and a massive waste problem. They are the solution to one another.

1,500+

enclosed shopping malls

built between 1970 and 2015

12M tons

of furniture discarded annually

by Americans

80%

goes directly to landfills

despite being functional

14¢

per dollar

what your donation is really worth

Why This Makes Me Angry

With the amount of furniture we throw away, I could have built entire homes.

With the amount of clothing we bury, how does anyone lack a great wardrobe?

With the food we waste, how is anyone hungry?

The math doesn't work. We have abundance flowing into landfills while people go without. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

The Vision

I want to buy a dying shopping mall.

I want to transform it into something America desperately needs: a place where stuff gets a second life instead of a one-way trip to the landfill.

The Furniture Workshop

Where teenagers refinish their first dresser

The Textile Lab

Where old jeans become new tote bags

The Electronics Repair Counter

Where your kid's dropped laptop gets fixed

The Materials Library

Where builders source reclaimed wood and salvaged fixtures

The Thrift Marketplace

Bigger than any Goodwill you've seen, and one that works

The Micro-Recycling Station

Where aluminum cans become raw material for local makers

The Community Spaces

Because some things should stay the same

01/07

This Is an Inevitability

We are told that "recycling" is putting a plastic bottle in a blue bin and hoping for the best. That's not enough. Real recycling is keeping things in the community loop.

I'm scouting the first location for an Upcycle Hub, right here in Sacramento. I'm looking for the mall owners who are tired of looking at empty parking lots, and the city leaders who are tired of paying landfill fees.

Mostly, I'm looking for you. I'm looking for the people who are tired of throwing away "the photographs."

The malls are waiting. The stuff is piling up. It's time we built a system as big as our waste.

Let's stop burying our history and start building our future.

Community energy - people building together

Ready to build with us?

Mall Owners

Let's talk about what your building could become.

City Leaders

Let's talk about solving three problems at once.

Everyone

Start with Upcycle Hub. We'll route it right.

Start with Upcycle Hub

Let's stop burying our history and start building our future.

Part 2: The Deep Dive

For those who want the details.

The Donation Industrial Complex

Goodwill Industries is a $6 billion operation. They process 4.3 billion pounds of donated goods every year. They position themselves as a nonprofit serving the community.

30 percent of what you donate goes straight to the landfill. Not because it's garbage. Because there's no infrastructure to sort, repair, or redirect it. One Seattle-area Goodwill affiliate paid $3 million in a single year to throw stuff away.

Your donation is worth 14 cents.

That's the going rate when Goodwill sells excess inventory by the pound to textile recyclers.

Your grandmother's hand-sewn quilt, the solid wood dresser you refinished: if it doesn't sell in four to six weeks, it gets bundled with everything else and sold for pennies.

The value doesn't stay in your community. Communities donate for free. Goodwill sells at 300 to 500 percent markup. Profits pay executive salaries. Many regional CEOs earn $400,000 to $700,000. Whatever doesn't sell gets dumped.

Meanwhile, Goodwill spent years lobbying for the right to pay disabled workers below minimum wage. Some as low as 22 cents an hour. They positioned themselves as a jobs program while extracting value from communities and paying their executives like Fortune 500 CEOs.

These aren't villains. They're organizations operating within a broken system. The system that tells us "donation" means "someone else's problem now."

The System is Broken Three Ways

Getting rid of stuff is expensive.

Call a junk removal company. They'll charge you $300 to $500 to haul away a living room's worth of furniture. Most of that furniture is still functional. Much of it is valuable. The economics of the current system mean it's cheaper to bury it than to sort, repair, and resell it.

The infrastructure doesn't exist.

Where do you take a working refrigerator you don't need anymore? Where do you take a dining table with a wobbly leg? Where do you learn to fix the wobbly leg yourself? The answer, for most Americans, is: nowhere. We have scattered thrift stores, sporadic repair cafes, and the chaos of Facebook Marketplace. We don't have a system.

The value gets destroyed.

Your grandmother's dresser, built in 1960, is solid wood. The particle board dresser from Target in 2020 will fall apart in five years. We treat them the same. Both go to the dump. We're destroying value at industrial scale, in communities that are simultaneously watching their malls die.

What an Upcycle Mall Looks Like

The Donation Center (Former Anchor Store)

That empty 100,000 square foot anchor, the space where Sears or Macy's used to live, becomes the donation processing hub.

Trucks pull up to the loading dock. Items get photographed, tagged, and sorted:

Resale-ready items go directly to the marketplace
Repair-needed items go to workshops
Materials (wood, metal, fabric) go to the materials library
Trash goes to appropriate disposal

This is the infrastructure that doesn't exist in most communities. A single point of intake that can handle volume.

Those 1,500 to 2,500 square foot retail slots become specialized workshops:

Furniture Workshop

Sanding, refinishing, reupholstering. Staffed by pros, open to community classes. That dresser with the scratched top gets stripped and restained. The chair with the torn fabric gets new cushions.

Electronics Repair

Component-level repair for phones, laptops, and appliances. Partner with local vocational schools. The Right to Repair movement made physical.

Textile Lab

Industrial sewing machines, fabric printers, pattern libraries. Turn old clothes into new products. Run classes for fashion students and hobbyists.

Tool Library & Micro-Manufacturing

Borrow what you need, return it when you're done. Why does every household need its own circular saw?

The workshops aren't for repair alone. They're for production. Recovered materials become feedstock for new products. A furniture maker uses reclaimed wood from the materials library. A metalworker uses salvaged steel. A seamstress uses vintage fabrics. They're small manufacturers with access to free raw materials and a built-in retail channel. That's a competitive advantage no one else can offer.

The Marketplace (Center Court and Former Retail)

This is the revenue engine. A massive secondhand retail operation:

Furniture showroom with staged rooms
Clothing sections organized by size and style, not dumped in bins
Housewares, electronics, sporting goods, curated and organized
Consignment section for higher-value items
Online integration with local delivery

This is a destination. Clean floors, good lighting, organized inventory. A place you'd want to shop.

Curated vintage.

A section for the good stuff: mid-century furniture, vintage clothing, collectibles, antiques. Priced for what they're worth.

Upcycled products.

Local makers transform recovered materials into new products. The woodworker building cutting boards from reclaimed walnut. The seamstress turning vintage fabrics into bags. The artist making sculptures from salvaged metal. They sell finished goods right here. Circular economy, closed loop.

The Materials Library

For builders, contractors, artists, and makers:

Salvaged lumber, sorted by species and size
Reclaimed fixtures: doors, windows, hardware
Architectural elements: mantels, moldings, tiles
Industrial materials: metal, glass, stone
Fabric remnants and leather scraps

Pay by the piece or by weight. A resource that doesn't exist anywhere else in your community.

I've worked construction cleanup. I know what gets thrown away. Most of it shouldn't.

The Community Spaces (Former Food Court)

Keep the food court energy, redirect the purpose:

Repair cafes (monthly community fix-it events)
Skill-share meetups
Sustainability workshops and youth programs
Local maker markets and swap events
Event rentals for reunions, parties, community gatherings

The mall was always about community gathering. This gives it a purpose beyond consumption.

The Micro-Recycling Station

Partner with local makers who can process materials on-site:

Glass blowing studio using collected bottles
Aluminum workshop turning cans into raw stock
Compost operation feeding community gardens
Plastic processing for 3D printing feedstock

Close the loop locally. Turn waste into material. Material into product. Product into revenue.

Why This Matters to Local Government

Your local waste authority wants this to exist. WPWMA, the Western Placer Waste Management Authority, built a $120 million materials recovery facility. State-of-the-art sorting technology that can separate 55 different material types from the waste stream.

Sorting is half the problem. Once you've separated the aluminum from the plastic from the cardboard, someone has to use it. Right now, most of that material gets shipped overseas. To China, Southeast Asia, wherever the economics work.

"We would rather ship our outputs across the street than across the ocean."

That's the opportunity. An Upcycle Mall isn't competing with the waste system. It's completing it. The sorting facility outputs material. The Mall inputs material. Local makers turn it into products. We keep the value in the community.

Municipal partnerships aren't a nice-to-have. They're the foundation. The infrastructure exists on the waste side. We're building the infrastructure on the reuse side.

The Economics

I'm not running a charity. This has to be a real business.

I've run businesses before: Dirtbag Tea Company, The Paisley Cafe, a vintage thrift shop. Physical retail and e-commerce. I know what it takes to keep the lights on.

Revenue Streams

Resale Operations: The thrift marketplace is the core revenue driver. Pricing based on market value, not arbitrary tags. Online sales extending reach beyond foot traffic. Consignment programs sharing revenue with donors on higher-value items. Furniture restoration adding margin to raw donations.

Maker Outputs: The workshops produce sellable goods. Restored furniture, upcycled textiles, reclaimed wood products—all sold through the marketplace. The workshop subsidizes itself through what it creates, not what it charges for access.

Paid Services: Junk removal and donation pickup, priced below competitors because we keep the value. Repair services for those who want it done for them. Event space rentals.

Partnerships: Municipal contracts for waste diversion. Grants for workforce development and sustainability programs. Corporate donation programs. Educational partnerships with schools and community colleges—students get hands-on training, we get skilled labor. Materials supply agreements with local builders and makers. Community investment from people who want this to exist.

What's NOT a Revenue Stream

Workshop and equipment access. This is community infrastructure, not a profit center. Makerspaces fail when financial barriers prevent community scale. The workshops pay for themselves through what they produce—not what they charge to enter.

Cost Advantages

Real estate: Dying malls are cheap. Desperate landlords negotiate creative deals. Some cities subsidize mall redevelopment.

Inventory: We don't buy inventory. We receive it as donations. Our cost of goods is labor and logistics, not wholesale.

Labor: Mix of paid staff and community volunteers. Partner with workforce development programs. Provide pathways to employment.

Utilities: Big-box retail spaces are efficient. Already wired for high-capacity use.

Unit Economics

A well-run thrift operation generates $50 to $100 per square foot annually.

A 100,000 square foot operation should target:

$5 to $10 million annual revenue from resale
$1 to $2 million from services and rentals
$500,000 to $1 million from partnerships and contracts

Operating margins in thrift and resale run 10 to 25 percent.

This isn't a moonshot. This is a viable business.

What We're Up Against

I won't pretend this is easy.

The real estate is complicated.

Mall ownership is often fragmented. Multiple anchors, dozens of small tenants, complex lease structures. Dying malls sometimes have dying owners who'd rather let the property rot than negotiate.

The waste industry doesn't want competition.

Landfills make money when stuff gets buried. Junk removal companies make money when stuff gets hauled. A system that diverts waste threatens existing business models.

Consumer habits are hard to change.

We've trained a generation to buy cheap, throw away fast, and not think about where it goes. Changing that requires more than a good building. It requires a cultural shift.

Funding is tricky.

This doesn't fit neatly into venture capital models. It's not pure nonprofit. It's a hybrid that confuses traditional funders.

The alternative is worse.

We can keep building landfills until we run out of land. We can keep letting malls decay into eyesores. We can keep throwing away value and then complaining that nothing is made to last.

Or we can build something different.