In 2009, PACA was under contract to re-stack thousands of street pavers for the City of Champaign. Due to rainy summer weather and with only a few stalwart volunteers helping, the project was way behind schedule. But two weekends in October totally changed the unsightly brick pile at the city’s public works yard.
On Saturday, October 17, 2009 twenty-five PACA volunteers cleaned and stacked forty-six pallets of pavers in five hours! This is all the more remarkable as the average age of the volunteers was over fifty! This volunteer group then issued a “challenge” to the following weekend’s group, twenty-eight cadets from Lincoln’s Challenge to beat that record. With an average age of seventeen, the cadets handily cleaned and stacked fifty-nine pallets in six hours. Between these two efforts, the brick pile was reduced to almost nothing.
This is a win-win situation for the City of Champaign and PACA. The city received eighty-five pallets of pavers stacked on durable plastic pallets; the pavers were cleaned and sorted with unusable and broken pavers discarded. PACA also made arrangements for these remnants to be ground up for road pack rather than sent to a landfill as was previously done. PACA received sixty-five pallets of pavers, also stacked on durable plastic pallets donated by Kraft, which was looking for a way to recycle their used pallets.
Street pavers are sold by PACA at a very reasonable price of fifty cents per paver.
