Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Book Recycling Project Returns

The IPE program in partnership with ReadingTree.org is proud to bring back the book recycling project to our campus. Puget Sound students, faculty and staff recycled more than 8000 books through this program since 2005.

ReadingTree collects books and recycles them to reading programs for low income students in the United States and to
establish community libraries in developing countries. This keeps the books out of the landfill and recycles them to people who need them.

Usually the high cost of shipping books abroad dooms unwanted books to the landfill. The ReadingTree program sells some of the books it collects to raise money for shipping and handling costs. This makes the program economically sustainable -- a great advantage. The fraction of books that are so badly damaged as to be unusable are shredded and used to make recycled paper products. So the program supports environmental sustainability, too. And, of course, it gets books to people in the U.S. and less developed countries who could not afford to buy them.

Our project focuses on recycling surplus or unwanted books of all kinds. There are a lot of books that are discarded every year – we’d like to get those books into the recycling pipeline and keep them out of the landfill.

Watch for book recycling signs and recycling bins in WSC and other campus locations. The collection bins will be in place by Monday, May 4. All of the collection areas will be in operation through finals week.

Thanks to the IPE majors on the UPS crew team (and especially to Laura Thomas) who volunteered to shoulder the burden of this program!

P.S. You can donate books at any time using the big blue and yellow book recycle station at the south side of WSC, near the outside entrance to the Pizza Cellar.

1 comment:

Patrick said...

Thanks for doing this! I have asked Laura to take all the books in the PG bookcase in Wyatt (as well as every book in Professor Veseth's office).