First, I want to take a moment to thank everyone for reading my very first blog. Then, I would like to take a moment to thank all of my friends and family who have helped and supported me on this journey of starting my own junk removal business. If it was helping me build my first website or helping me in a crunch when I needed some muscle moving furniture, they have all tremendously supported me so that I could get to this point.
In my first blog I want to get take a moment to introduce myself and tell how and why I decided to get into this business. I also want to explain the philosophy behind Do Not Throw It Away, what we do and what makes us different from most other companies doing junk removal and estate cleanouts.
I graduated East Brunswick High School and came back after college. I was undecided about what my future would be but knew that I did not want to work in an office. During this time, I became involved with social action programs in East Brunswick.
It all started when I assisted with a Boy Scout program in East Brunswick, that I later ended up running for two years. The program was called the Ten Commandment Hike. This was an amazing opportunity for all scouts in Middlesex County of all faiths to get together and learn about different religions. The hike was a walk to different houses of worships where the clergy would talk about two of the Ten Commandments and how it related to their religion. They also had the opportunity to talk about whatever they felt was important to their house of worship This led me to learning about an amazing program going on in my home town of East Brunswick. We learned about the Aldersgate Crisis Room where they were giving bags of food to over 100 families once a week. It is run by volunteers and donations and they were also selling clothes and household items at very reasonable prices to the families in need.
This caused us to increase my other social action work in East Brunswick and Monroe and word started to get out that I could help people get rid of things they no longer needed. After months of doing this I started to realize that my little Corolla was not able to handle the volume any longer. At this point, I decided that I wanted to start a company helping people get rid of junk and anything else they no longer wanted. So, after buying a truck and waiting almost two years for the state of New Jersey to grant a license to haul waste I was finally in business.
Now that I was all set up and ready to go I had a decision to make. Should I be like the rest of the junk companies or should I follow my own philosophies. My decision was to bring a new experience and expectation to the junk business. At Do Not Throw It Away we want to make every customer feel like they are part of our family. Every one of our customers will get the same treatment that anyone of us would give to our own family members if we were cleaning out their homes. We decided to price based upon what you are getting rid, of not by volume, because not everything is junk.
We understand that some of your belongings have value, and we are committed to making sure that when we price a clean out it will reflect this in the pricing. Because of this we are committed to giving our customers the fairest prices. Not everything is junk and therefore disposed of in the same way. If some items can be sold, or donated, or recycled, less will be put in the landfill, and we think it is only fair that you see this difference as a saving in your bill.
We understand that something might have been passed down through multiple generations.
Therefore, we train our employees to make sure that they are paying attention when going through things. Just because we are going through what you might think is junk or do not want, we know things get misplaced. There have been countless numbers of times when we have found pictures and other family memories that we have returned to our customers.
Another way that Do Not Throw It Away follows our own philosophies is because we do not see ourselves as a junk company, but as an ecofriendly resource making sure that everything you no longer want finds the correct home. This means we donate, recycle, and sell what we can so that it finds the best new home with the least amount of impact to the environment. In those inevitable times that we cannot find another solution, we can bring junk to a landfill. We believe that since we are adding to the landfills and the pollution problems of this planet we have an obligation to help correct this. We are helping to make a difference in multiple ways, such as making donations to plant trees or remove plastic from our oceans and doing local community projects because we want to do everything we can to make this a greener planet.
At Do Not Throw It Away, we believe that as a business we have more of a responsibility than just helping you. We strive as a company to encourage ourselves and our employees to volunteer in the local community helping those in need and remembering how we got started.
Thanks,
Andrew Cerame
Do Not Throw It Away 