Film Biz Recycling

Built from a conversation with Eva Radke, July 2026.

The record

Founded

May 2008 by Eva Radke (Fort Greene, then Long Island City, then Gowanus)

Location

11,000 sq ft warehouse, Gowanus, Brooklyn (from ~2010)

Type

501(c)(3) nonprofit prop house and creative reuse center

Material diverted

600+ tons over its lifetime (closure statement, 2015)

Peak intake

~10 tons per month

To charities

~60% of all intake redistributed

EPA award

2014 U.S. EPA Region 2 Environmental Quality Award

The Brooklyn chapter closed

June 2015. Cause: inability to secure the ~$100K/year that the retail floor did not cover. The work did not end; it relocated and continued.

Founder's next

ArtCube Nation, the worldwide art-department network Radke grew from a 2007 Google group. Still founder and CEO; approaching its 20-year anniversary.

Brand continues

Savannah, GA, as a separate 501(c)(3) under Samita Wolfe, a former Navy sailor Radke mentored, who reopened the doors on Earth Day 2017.

Eva Radke spent fifteen years in production, the last ten in the art department, working as a freelance coordinator on New York commercials, television, and film. She had grown up in a conservative Texas oil family and left for New York at twenty-two, funding her film books by selling her business textbooks back to the University of Texas. The irony was not lost on her later: an oil heiress who built a warehouse to keep things out of the ground.

The breaking point came in pieces. It started as a matter of respect for the art itself: scenic artists, true painters, would make big, beautiful, genuine paintings for a shoot, and the moment the camera stopped they went in the dumpster. "Our art is not garbage," she said. Then came the absurdity that made the waste impossible to ignore. For a January 2007 toothpaste commercial, a client wanted fresh green peppermint plants; Radke found a Florida grower to hydroponically raise them, chartered an empty prop plane to fly them to JFK, sent in her birth certificate for the tarmac permit, and staged a heated truck in one-degree cold to keep them alive. Seven thousand dollars of logistics. On the day, the production looked at the seven skids of hallowed mint and used the $250 plastic backups instead. And then, on a wrap that same season, forced to throw out a mid-century credenza that nobody would take before the 4:55 cutoff at Silvercup, she hit the wall: "If I can't give away a mid-century credenza in New York City, something is very wrong. I know so many people who would love this right now." Newly a mother, pumping milk in the cube truck to send home with the PAs, she decided her time was worth more than trashing the planet her son would inherit. She took a thirty-day cash job she tried to price herself out of, got it anyway, and used the stack to walk away from the business and start a nonprofit.

What she built was eleven thousand square feet of counter-argument, though it did not start that big. Film Biz Recycling opened in 2008 in a Fort Greene apartment, moved to a small Long Island City space, and only around 2010 reached the Gowanus warehouse it became known for. The model was simple and unglamorous: a one-stop drop-off for the paint, furniture, wardrobe, set dressing, and raw materials that productions sent to the dump, and a retail floor that worked like the most thoughtfully curated thrift store in the borough, because everything in it had come from a film set. Workshops, green-production seminars, a staff of about a dozen. Roughly sixty percent of everything through the loading dock found its way to local charities, arts programs, and reuse centers, and only two or three percent ever reached a landfill. At peak, ten tons arrived every month.

In May 2014, six years in, Film Biz Recycling held the first Golden Dumpster Awards at the warehouse. The Founder's Award for an Individual Displaying Utter Greatness went to Emellie O'Brien of Earth Angel. Radke had opened one of the first operations of its kind on the East Coast, and she was now publicly honoring the person who would carry the category forward. That same spring, the U.S. EPA gave Film Biz Recycling its 2014 Region 2 Environmental Quality Award.

The closure of the Brooklyn warehouse, when it came, was about money and not relevance. The prop floor covered roughly eighty percent of the budget, but the remaining twenty, about a hundred thousand dollars a year, was nowhere to be found, and a state development grant that had carried the gap for a while ran out. Film Biz Recycling did not fit the traditional charity funding model: it looked like a thrift store and acted like a public utility, and the institutions that might have funded it did not know which one they were looking at. The MPAA, in Radke's account, told her they already had a carting company. They thought she was a garbage operation groveling for a contract. The warehouse was vacated by late June 2015.

But "closed" is the wrong verb for what happened next, and Radke is quick to correct it: "It moved. It didn't go out of business." The Film Biz Recycling name reopened in Savannah under Samita Wolfe and still does the work it was built for. And the deeper engine had already outgrown the warehouse. Out of a 2007 Google group named for the ArtCube trucks that fetch whatever a set needs, Radke had built ArtCube Nation, now a worldwide professional network for art-department, fabrication, and design crews across more than a hundred cities, a peer-to-peer marketplace that does online, without rent, what the warehouse did on the ground. Its most remarkable hour came during the early pandemic, when ArtCube's makers, prop fabricators, and seamstresses became an ad-hoc PPE supply chain for New York City hospitals, hand-delivering face shields and gear across all five boroughs while the official supply sat stalled at quota. A pulmonologist later estimated to Radke that the stopgap may have prevented on the order of a hundred thousand COVID exposures in the window before the real supply chain caught up. "I will die for this community," she says, "because this is who these people are." Art department, in her telling, is simply the part of any world that steps up and makes something out of nothing, fast, with no room for error, and it is exactly that instinct, pointed at waste instead of a shot list, that she has spent her life organizing.

Radke was always clear that the loss of the warehouse was the field's and not only hers. "It's like watching a unicorn die," she said of the closing. But she also said the thing that turned out to be true: that Obi-Wan and Dumbledore were stronger in death, and that maybe her impact would be felt more once the thing itself was gone. She was right. The people who came after learned from what she built and from what it cost her, and she is still here, still building, twenty years in, the lightning point that lit a great deal of what followed.

"Obi-Wan and Dumbledore were stronger in death, so maybe my impact will be felt even more now."

Eva Radke, founder, Film Biz Recycling, on its closing, Brokelyn, April 2015

"It moved. It didn't go out of business."

Eva Radke, correcting the record, 2026

Further reading

• Find Eva on LinkedIn
• See what Eva is up to now with ArtCube