Support charity while clearing away clutter
Lake Zurich-based Junk Remedy is becoming well-known in the Chicago area - not only for helping people to clean out their garages, basements, parents' houses or other junk-filled locations, but also for stepping in and offering its trash-removal skills free during area Relay For Life events.
Junk Remedy owners Nick DeGiulio and Corey Heidkamp and their crew also help area families and work to preserve the environment by salvaging usable furnishings, household goods and clothing from their various clean-out jobs. They truck these items to WINGS in Palatine, Schaumburg or Niles instead of sending them to the local landfill.
"We have had a very good partnership with Nick and Corey over the past few years," said Rebecca Darr, CEO of WINGS, which provide services to victims of domestic violence.
"They have brought us many things that they have cleaned out of houses over the years, trucking them without charge," Darr said. "We then use those items in our 45-bed emergency shelter or in our 30 homes and apartments around Lake County and Northwest Cook County - or we sell them in our three (secondhand resale) stores.
"In this way, Junk Remedy has definitely helped area families escape abuse and domestic violence. The value of what they have brought us is certainly in the thousands (of dollars)," she said.
This practice also benefits Junk Remedy clients, Heidkamp said, because when items are donated to a major local charity, the company issues a charitable tax deduction letter to the homeowners.
Area WINGS stores are not the only place where Junk Remedy trucks and staff are routinely seen these days. The past three summers the company has provided free trash removal to Relay For Life events in Schaumburg, Barrington, Palatine, Arlington Heights and Wheeling, Heidkamp said. The relays raise money for the American Cancer Society.
"We were talking to the organizers of the Relays For Life to see how we could help and discovered they were annually incurring big costs to clean up after the event, so we offered to help. In the past few years we have hauled away the trash each year and have made the facilities look as if no one had even been there. We estimate the value of those cleanups at $3,000 each," he said.
"Cancer affects everyone, so we are pleased that we can help fight it in this way," Heidkamp said.
In addition, the Junk Remedy crew provided a similar service to the "Fort2Base Race" from Fort Sheridan to the Great Lake Naval Training Base, and to both the Color Blast 5K and the Salute 5K, both held in Arlington Heights.
"We provided our cleanup services to eight different events this past summer, for a total value of $25,000. We do a lot of networking and whenever we hear about an event that needs our help, we step forward if we are available," he said.
Junk Remedy has also distributed toys to children at Maryville Academy in Des Plaines and donated cleanup service packages to various organizations' raffles.
"We are a community-based, locally owned and operated company - not a franchise. So we believe in working hard to give back to the local communities that support our business," Heidkamp said.
No job is too large or too small for DeGiulio and Heidkamp, old friends who went into business together in late 2009. Their goal was to bring social media marketing, an environmental consciousness and a concern for the needy to a business that once would have primarily involved repeated trips to the dump.
Today their company has nine employees in addition to themselves working throughout the greater Chicago area, within a 50-mile radius of the city. They own four trucks and also have a 4,000-square-foot warehouse.
"We recycle and donate as much as we can from every job we do, throwing away as little as possible," Heidkamp said. "Anything electronic is palletized and sent to a recycler. Furniture and clothes are donated primarily to WINGS. We also work off other organizations' wish lists, filling whatever needs we can."
DeGiulio said crews "work like a well-oiled machine" because they have been doing this for so long. "On a big job we will have different trucks dedicated to different materials so we can do the sorting on-site and keep our eco-footprint low by not transporting items twice."
Junk Remedy gives free estimates, schedules a specific day and time for the work and handles all loading, labor, cleanup and disposal fees. It is also licensed, bonded and insured.
"We meet with potential clients and find out how they want the job done and then try to be as cost-effective as possible. We offer a very significant bang for our clients' buck. Our minimum fee is $140 and it goes up to $550 for a full truck. All of the hauling, labor and disposal fees are built into the price of the truck," Heidkamp said.
For more information, visit www.junkremedy.com or call (877) 722-5865 (JUNK).