Material Warehouse

At T4T we strive to source wonderful, clean, safe, interesting items that local businesses discard in abundance, and make them available to shoppers at the warehouse and on the Treasure Truck. Over the past 7 years we’ve collected materials from over 200 companies, most of those original manufacturers still donate to T4T today. Since we first opened our doors in 2004, T4T has diverted over 50,000 pounds of materials from local landfill. Those materials include an abundance of plastic and cardboard thread cones, in all colors shapes and sizes, beautiful wood from a shutter company, plastic color chips, glass tubes, fabric and trim, colorful rubber mats, tiles, tubes, Styrofoam….and the list goes on.

In the beginning we sourced and picked up materials ourselves. Today many companies call us to offer and deliver their discards, they like to support T4T because as Marty Kallem puts it: “Spectratek Technologies benefits in two ways, by contributing our holographic discards to Trash for Teaching. we aren’t throwing away as much material, which helps us, since we have to pay for every bit of material that we throw away, plus we’re not filling up the landfills and in addition, our materials help teach children about physics, light and products out in the marketplace today. A third benefit is that teachers get cool materials to use with their students. Normally our trash output can be in the tens of thousands of pounds a week, as just a result of manufacturing, so to even make a dent in that is phenomenal in my eyes.”

Anyone can visit and shop at the T4T warehouse in Gardena, California.

Material Membership- Information on purchasing materials

Material Gallery- Sample images of the kinds of materials you might find at the warehouse

Warehouse Gallery – Images of our warehouse.

Contact Us- Costs, hours, & Directions

Donate Materials- If you or your business would like to donate runoffs, off casts, or overages to T4T