It’s a busy Monday at the Loading Dock, a cavernous, 42,000-square-foot retail warehouse in Baltimore that is stocked floor-to-ceiling with salvaged building materials. Leslie Kirkland, executive director of the nonprofit store, is trying to figure out where to stash four semitrailer loads of rolled carpet remnants.

Like the bulk of the store’s inventory, the new carpet was donated by a local company and, instead of ending up in a landfill, will find use in homes across the greater Baltimore area. Over the next few weeks, 15 roll-off Dumpsters of used lumber will be delivered to the Loading Dock, along with kitchen cabinets and appliances from a 400-unit apartment building, all destined for reuse.

Kirkland’s organization claims to be the oldest nonprofit “reuse center.” Since it opened 23 years ago, it’s expanded several times to meet customers’ demand for inexpensive sinks, doors, carpets, and the like. “We’re busting at the seams,” she says. “We’ve been here two years and we could already use another 40,000 square feet.” Similar stories are playing out every day across the country at hundreds of reuse stores as the idea of saving cash by recycling building materials catches on.

While there’s always been a market for architectural salvage, in the past it was largely con-fined to boutique shoppers seeking a match to an antique wall sconce, a carved oak mantelpiece, or marble door handles. Stores like the Loading Dock cater to a less rarefied crowd of bargain hunters and low-income home owners. “We’re like a secondhand Home Depot,” Kirkland says. “We have claw-foot bathtubs, and that gets at some of the fun architectural salvage side of it. But our mission is to provide low-cost building materials.”

It’s a mission that dovetails with the nation’s burgeoning green building movement. Flip through the glossy home and garden magazines and you come away with an impression of green building that features expensive high-tech gadgetry like photovoltaic solar systems and geothermal pumps, or pricey products like organic sheets and bamboo compost containers. But running out to buy the latest hip “green lifestyle” product might actually do more harm than good. It turns out that the greenest choice of all may be reusing salvaged materials from a place like the Loading Dock.