Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510070003
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KARYN HUNT ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: SAN RAFAEL, CALIF. LENGTH: Medium
You can now have a hunk of Hollywood in every room with the introduction of a new line of furniture made of recycled wood from movie sets.
The pieces come from an environmentally minded Southern Californian who reclaims the wood, strips and sands it down, then refashions it into coffee tables, lamp tables, benches, chests, armoires and other custom-made items.
The wood is kept separate according to the set it comes from and the end products are tagged accordingly: ``Apollo 13,'' ``Batman Forever,'' ``Congo,'' ``Crimson Tide,'' ``True Lies'' and other blockbusters.
The idea is to reduce the flow of garbage into overflowing landfills and slow the cutting of forests.
``I'm a tree person,'' said 41-year-old Jeryl Pinkert of Redondo Beach, who designs and makes the furniture. ``I'm a very nature-oriented person. My first glimpse of clear-cutting was the most disgusting thing I ever saw in my life.''
``When I saw the waste that Hollywood creates, I knew this goes on throughout the country, throughout the world. Wherever they film on location,'' he added.
``I'm trying to wise people up. Furniture happens to be the medium that I'm working with, but I'm in it for the cause.''
Pinkert started transforming the film industry's garbage into collector items in 1991 when he got a job tearing down sets at an independent studio.
``Being like everybody else, I thought they reused the parts over and over and over again,'' he recalled. ``I was shocked because I thought, my God, does this happen everywhere? Then I started finding out that it does.''
He made arrangements to take some of it home and create his first piece - a dining room table for his wife. Friends and family liked it so much that he made bedroom sets for them.
A year later, he went to work for a company that had started recycling for the studios and was even more distressed to find out that most of the wood they hauled off the studio lots - much of it good quality - was made into warehouse palates.
After several years during which he made about 200 pieces for friends and contacts who found him through word of mouth, he hooked up in April up with a major supplier of environmentally smart products, San Rafael-based WorldWise.
Then business started to take off. WorldWise got the furniture into Price Club and Costco warehouses in Santa Clarita and the City of Industry.
There, they are priced to appeal to the ``everyday average Joe who has a kind of gut sense that if the product works as well as non-environmental alternatives and is priced competitively, then he may as well buy the environmental alternative,'' WorldWise Executive Vice President Aaron Lamstein said.
Now, Pinkert is making plans to mass-produce his line. He is moving into a larger shop on a landfill site in Sun Valley, where some of the wood he uses is dumped.
The move makes sense, he said.
``If you look at the wood, it looks like garbage,'' he said. ``If you come into my shop and see what I've got, the average person would say, `If I was desperate, I might make that into shelves for my garage.'''
``It's an incredible transition that it makes, but it turns out beautiful.''
by CNB