Reduce Reuse Recycle

The 3 R's of Recycling are Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Now I know that in a remodel there will have to be some garbage. But in terms of overall impact, we figured that remodeling our current house still has less impact than purchasing a new one, since much of the house materials will be reused.
So in our eco philosophy, we wanted to make sure that wherever possible, anything we were not re-using for the remodel would at first try to have other use, by garage sale, Craig's list, Habitat for Humanity Donations, and local recycling services. The last place we wanted our materials to go was the city landfill.
Our contractor said he was on board with the philosophy, and did he best to organize Habitat to try to take many of our kitchen goods (cabinets, appliances, fixtures, etc), but apparently Habitat can get new products donated, and thus had no need for our slightly used products. Now the spin Ilisa says, is that this is one more case of evidence that we had a well outdated kitchen, and yet another reason we HAD to remodel.
We were able to save some of the wood beams and joists that we will either use for our concrete framing, or have Ish refinish and use for decorative accents in our new vaulted ceiling.
I am not blaming the Contractor for not doing more here, just trying to learn the lesson that before you start the project, one might want to look up more avenues for recycling, and not put all your eggs in a basket like our Habitat hopes. Our contractor also has started finding what surplus materials (such as a shower and kitchen fixture) he can re-use (many of these are brand new).
We did find a local recycler called EDCO (http://www.edcodisposal.com/), and hopefully our contractor will see what this organization can do for reusing or recycling some of our goods. He also mentioned that he contact our local Waste Management, and they did say that many people often go through such dumpsters for good freebies. I will also look into our local free cycle organization and see if anyone nearby would like to go dumpster diving.
We are now finding some speed-bumps in our process (we had expected this). We know that one of the big goals of this project was for us to learn some useful lessons that we could provide to others who want to get involved in a similar project so that other might not make the same mistakes.

I'll probably start a section on the right where we list the lessons learned for easy access for all visitors. Thanks everyone, and Bill I hope no hard feelings. We really do appreciate all the wonderful work you have done so far.