{"id":455265,"date":"2025-12-18T09:48:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T09:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/455265\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T09:48:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T09:48:11","slug":"germantown-resident-starts-eco-friendly-junk-removal-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/455265\/","title":{"rendered":"Germantown resident starts eco-friendly junk removal business"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Germantown resident Aaron Bigeleisen drives around Northwest Philadelphia, he sees a range of items in the trash<\/a> that don\u2019t belong there: furniture, toys and functional fans.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery day and every week, people are throwing away items that other people need,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Those observations motivated the 30-year-old to start Unfunk Your Stuff<\/a>, an eco-friendly junk removal and moving nonprofit in the Greater Philadelphia region. Bigeleisen partners with nonprofits to repurpose and resell peoples\u2019 discarded stuff, instead of putting them in landfills.<\/p>\n

He offers customers appraisals for junk removal and sends pictures of every item to the nonprofits to find them homes. Some items cannot be salvaged, such as wet wood and old metal, he said. His services also feature a \u201cprize wheel\u201d that customers can spin to receive discounts or gift cards.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can have fun. We can do serious things and have a good time. So for me, I like the idea of being able to have my prices such that I can give discounts and offer people something interactive,\u201d he said at Char & Stave the other week, donning his business\u2019 T-shirt.<\/p>\n

Since starting the business in January out of his own pocket, he\u2019s served customers in Mt. Airy, Chestnut Hill and Germantown, recycling an estimated 75% of their items. It became a full-time job last month, and he has four part-time employees, he said.<\/p>\n

The Rochester native is a trained opera singer, and he moved to Philadelphia in 2019 to teach music. But in the last few years, Bigeleisen experienced intense depression and took it out negatively on other people, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was really unhealthily self-centered and just focused on anything but really caring about other people and the world around me,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s just been in the past few months that I\u2019ve started to kind of wake up. What is it that I can do to actually serve other people and serve the world?\u201d<\/p>\n

Municipal solid waste landfills were the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in 2022, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency<\/a>. And Philadelphia disposes 1.5 million tons of waste every year, the city reported in 2017<\/a>. Anti-dumping advocates<\/a> are calling for the city to allow small commercial haulers to use convenience centers at a reduced cost, so they\u2019re less inclined to illegally dump.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are overwhelmed, and they don\u2019t know what else to do. And so they put them out to the curb\u2026\u201d Bigeleisen said. \u201cAnd for me, I know somebody needs all this stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

He partners with Goodwill, Salvation Army and, recently, PAR-Recycle Works,<\/a> a nonprofit that hires formerly incarcerated people to recycle electronics.<\/p>\n

Another major partner of his is Philly Unknown<\/a>, which supports people recently released from addiction treatment or incarceration. Bigeleisen helps move storage and delivers items to its Community Thrift store<\/a> in Brewerytown.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s reliable, dependable, and he is extremely efficient with what he does. He\u2019s extremely community-focused about it. We\u2019re a nonprofit, so he definitely has taken that into consideration and wanted to pay things forward and do some good in the community,\u201d said Britt Carpenter, the executive director for Philly Unknown.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bigeleisen is aiming to donate a minimum of 10% of the revenue to nonprofit causes every month. In the future, he hopes to have a warehouse where he can store hardware, furniture and other materials.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese days, pretty much nobody can really agree on anything. Everybody has a different opinion. But when it comes to trash\u2026 nobody wants to see a nice dresser go in the trash. Everybody wants it to be easier for them to have something that\u2019s been sitting in their closet for 20 years\u2026 get to somebody else and not just go in the landfill,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Unfunk Your Stuff\u2019s prices<\/a> depend on the size of the load and moving team. Its junk removal prices range from $50-700, and the moving costs range from an estimated $75-$190 per hour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Germantown resident Aaron Bigeleisen drives around Northwest Philadelphia, he sees a range of items in the trash…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":455266,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,1448,2830,1311,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-455265","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-pa","10":"tag-pennsylvania","11":"tag-philadelphia","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115739945005905164","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=455265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/455266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=455265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=455265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=455265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}