The centerpiece of Home ReSource's Zero Waste Awards is a room full of objects that, not long ago, were headed for the dump. Chairs, tables, sculptures, and contraptions that began life as cast-off doors, ductwork, window casements, and PVC pipe will sit on display and go home with the highest bidders. It is a fitting centerpiece for an organization whose entire premise is that the things we throw away still have a story left in them.
The Zero Waste Awards runs October 3 from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at Home ReSource, 1515 Wyoming Street in Missoula. Tickets are $35, and space is limited at the ticketed dinner and ceremony. Proceeds support the nonprofit's community programs. The evening opens with a check-in and a mix-and-mingle hour set to live music from the band Good Old Fashioned, followed by dinner, drinks, and Home ReSource bingo. Silent auction bidding closes at 7 p.m., giving guests one last chance to claim the SponCon creations and other items donated by local businesses. The awards themselves are handed out between 7 and 8 p.m., with a "Raise the Paddle" appeal for the organization, then dessert and more live music before checkout at 8:30.
A note on the numbering: the television spot that publicized the event called it "first annual," and Home ReSource's own page once described it as "first-ever." The organization's current event page calls this the second annual Zero Waste Awards, and the event listing refers to it as "our annual Zero Waste Awards." What is not in dispute is the event's purpose: celebrating the people and organizations doing the unglamorous work of waste reduction.
This year's award categories include Volunteer of the Year, Community Partner, Educator of the Year, and a Zero Waste Hall of Fame, with more to be announced. The framing quote on the event page captures the spirit: "We don't need a few people doing zero-waste perfectly; we need millions of people doing zero-waste imperfectly."
The awards ceremony is the newer half of a two-part tradition. The older half is Spontaneous Construction, known to everyone as SponCon — a reuse-materials building competition and festival that Home ReSource has staged for roughly two decades. At SponCon, teams of DIYers, builders, artists, tinkerers, and total novices get seven hours to turn whatever they can scavenge from the Home ReSource ReUse Store into the most creative and functional thing they can dream up, using only their own skills and personal tools. Local judges award prizes at the end of the day. The finished pieces are then displayed publicly — in past years at the Missoula Public Library for a First Friday showing — before being sold at auction.
That auction is where the two events now meet. SponCon pieces are displayed at Home ReSource during September and can be bid on in silent-auction style all month; the Zero Waste Awards dinner is the last chance to place a bid before the gavel comes down. In earlier years, the SponCon items were sold at Home ReSource's annual banquet and benefit auction. The Zero Waste Awards, in effect, grew out of that banquet — a reimagined version of the same idea, rebuilt around the theme of creative reuse.
The creations themselves are the stuff of local legend. In a Missoula Current essay, one longtime SponCon family — a parent and two sons competing as Team Wunderkind — listed what they had built over the years: a giant marble run made from PVC pipe and golf balls, armor hammered out of ductwork, a Pachinko machine assembled from window casements, an ornate clock, a planter with a sink for a bowl, and a cascading fountain built from glass light fixtures. There was also a giant crossbow that fired a toilet plunger, which, along with a trebuchet, led organizers to ban weapons. The kids started competing at age six.
All of it traces back to 2003, when two University of Montana graduates, Lauren Varney and Matt Hisel, founded Home ReSource. Their idea was a retail operation that would reduce construction and demolition waste while feeding a local green economy. It began as a volunteer-run building-materials reuse center on Kent Street. The founders' early promotional photos, per the organization's own history page, show them rowing a bathtub.
Two decades later, the operation has grown well beyond a salvage yard. Home ReSource now describes itself as a community sustainability center that keeps more than 900 tons of material out of the landfill each year and provides materials and services to over half of Missoula households. In a single recent year, according to the organization, the ReUse Store kept more than one million pounds of usable materials out of the Missoula landfill, while its Green Team diverted over eighty-five thousand pounds of waste at community events. It created twenty-six low-barrier green jobs for neighbors facing barriers to stable, living-wage employment, and its ZWAP! program — Zero Waste Ambassadors — brought hands-on waste-reduction education to more than nine hundred fifth graders.
The nonprofit has also been navigating a more mundane challenge. In late 2025 it launched an "Own Our Home for the Holidays" campaign to retire its mortgage before an interest rate adjustment, arguing that freeing up more than $10,000 a month in interest payments would let it pour that money into programs instead. The "Raise the Paddle" moment at the awards dinner — billed as the single most impactful gift a supporter can give — ties directly into that effort.
That combination of the practical and the playful is the through-line. The Zero Waste Awards is, by the organization's own description, "a very Home ReSourcey party" — a dinner and ceremony where the entertainment is a room full of things other people threw away, remade into something worth bidding on. The point is not that anyone does zero waste perfectly. It is that a bathtub can become a boat, a sink can become a planter, and a Saturday's worth of scavenging can become next year's centerpiece.