Author: Mark Lennon

Around the world, hundreds of millions of children are missing the most basic elements for an education:  a desk and a chair.  Here in America, thousands of charter and tribal schools, community centers, and other local groups need to find furnishings at the lowest possible cost.

Meanwhile, thousands of public schools in America replace old furniture every year.  Almost all of it ends up getting thrown away.

Why?  Why do these fundamental school resources, with worldwide demand, end up in landfills?

There are two reasons:

There’s no one to make the match.  No school or district is set up to identify and reach out to the dozens or hundreds of organizations that might be able to use their furniture.

There’s no one to manage the project.  Nor is any school or district set up to arrange and manage moving, loading, and transportation of truckloads of furniture, with all the associated paperwork and financial transactions.

This is what IRN does.  It’s all that IRN does.  Our only mission is to match used, usable furniture with schools and nonprofits that need it, and then manage the transfer.

Since 2010 we’ve filled 500 tractor trailers with student desks, chairs, and other furniture from 61 schools and districts from Maine to California.  We’ve matched these items with dozens of charter and tribal schools, furniture banks, community centers, and other nonprofits in the United States, and international charities working in 22 countries in the Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

That’s about 90,000 pieces, more than four million pounds of good, usable school furniture kept out of U.S. landfills, and provided where it is truly needed.

What, exactly, do we do to make this happen?

We’ve been arranging reuse of surplus furnishings for 15 years.  We have a network of hundreds of charter and other schools, relief and development agencies, furniture banks, and other nonprofits that can accept, redistribute, and assure the reuse of your furnishings.  When you call us with an inventory, we identify the organization(s) most likely to need those particular furnishings.  We reach out and work with them until the entire inventory is claimed.

Then we set up and manage movers, we set up and manage transportation, we handle the paperwork, and we put a project manager onsite to assure that everything goes to plan.  We provide documentation so you know exactly where each item of your old furniture has gone and who is using it.

We make the match, and we manage the project.

Here’s a selection of photos showing furniture from IRN projects installed, in use, and making a difference.

The way we see it, we’re helping American educators extend their mission and success, by providing basic resources to needy schoolchildren in the U.S. and worldwide.  There’s more need for these furnishings than we can ever supply.  As they face huge social, environmental, diplomatic, health, and other challenges in the 21^st Century, education is the most important resource we can provide to the next generation.  Our excess furnishings are an essential part of the equation.

Additional Information:

Case Study, Wellesley (MA) High School

Case Study, Tahanto Regional Middle/High School (MA)

Case Study, Jefferson County (CO) Public School District

[contact-form][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Telephone’ type=’text’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]

In the fourteen years that we’ve been handling surplus, 2015 was IRN’s busiest.  We filled just about 600 tractor trailers with more than 122,000 pieces destined for reuse, and we recycled another 900,000 pounds of assets that were unsuitable for reuse.

Where From?

IRN recovered usable furnishings from 211 projects in 29 states, from Maine to California and Florida to Washington.  Our smallest projects captured just a few dozen pieces.  Our largest filled dozens of tractor trailers.  Our busiest regions were the Northeast and the West Coast, where population is concentrated and landfill tipping fees provide an additional incentive to think reuse.  The majority of organizations we work with are colleges and K-12 schools.  We also work with companies ranging from the Fortune 50 to local accountants and law firms, and with large and small healthcare organizations.

Click here for a summary of IRN’s Surplus Program, 2015

What?

More than 6,000 beds and mattresses; 4,400 dressers and wardrobes; 5,800 bookcases; 5,200 storage cabinets and 4,400 filing cabinets; more than 5,600 student chairs; 5,000 dining and dormitory chairs; 2,100 sofas and lounge chairs; 15,000 stacking chairs; 8,000 student desks; 2,100 tablet-arm desks also for students; 3,000 dormitory or bedroom desks; 12,000 tables; 1,900 bulletin boards, blackboards, and white-boards.  Plus appliances; office and school supplies; kitchen equipment; library furnishings; 1,000 stools; 100 sinks.  In total, more than 122,000 items, all suitable for reuse, all now being reused.

Where To?

In 2015 IRN more than doubled the number of nonprofits we worked with compared to any previous year.  Shipping overseas, IRN surplus moved through 14 different organizations providing relief and development assistance in 29 countries, including our first-ever shipments to the Pacific island nation of Micronesia.

Our proudest accomplishment, however, was expanding our network of recipients right here in the United States.  Excluding what we recycled for commodity value, in 2014 about 1.5 million pounds of IRN surplus went to U.S. nonprofits, while 4.4 million pounds went overseas.  In 2015 we shipped 4.1 million pounds overseas, while 2.4 million pounds went to U.S. nonprofits.  These included dozens of charter schools and other public schools, tribal schools, Habitat for Humanity ReStores, local furniture banks and thrift shops, and larger regional organizations.  In total, we provided furnishings to 98 different U.S. nonprofit organizations in the U.S. in 2015.

What’s Next?

In our world, one person’s trash is truly another person’s treasure.  Our job is to make that match, and we love what we do.

If you’re part of an organization with surplus furnishings that need to go away, or if you know of an organization with surplus that needs to go away, please put us in touch.  Without that trash, we can’t make treasure.

And if you’re part of or know of an organization that needs solid, usable furnishings for a residential, school, professional, healthcare, or any other setting, or that provides furnishings to the community as a nonprofit mission, we want to hear from you, too.  You tell us what counts as treasure for you, and we’ll go find it.

Looking back and ahead, we’d like to thank all of the organizations who make our work possible.  We look forward to many more years enjoying those relationships, and to all the new relationships to come.

Then there was the time we were doing a project at a prestigious New England college that will remain nameless.  For many, many years this college was all shaded with elm trees.  Then the elm trees died and the college looked like a prison.  So what they did, instead of planting just one or two kinds of trees as a replacement, they planted all different kinds of trees.  They basically turned the campus into an arboretum, with one kind or another of special and unique tree everywhere you look.

We were emptying furniture from a bunch of dormitories, thirteen tractor-trailers in all.  Long trailers, 53-footers, with long overnight cabs.  So every time a trailer arrived, I ran out to guide it in, to make sure it didn’t knock into a tree.  God forbid we should break a branch, dislocate a leave, tweak a trunk, blemish some bark, ravage a root.  Twelve times I did this.  Twelve trailers backed in without more than gently caressing a leaf or two.

Then, of course, lucky thirteen.  This guy called and told me where he was, so I ran across campus to bring him in.  But when I was running that way, he decided to drive this way, find the dormitory on his own.  Which he did, the jerk, and backed his truck right up to the back door, the jerk, right through half of a Zincus speciallas or a Quincus uncommonus or a Flunculus exceptionalis, or whatever the damn rare tree was.  The jerk.  So I got back huffing and puffing from not finding the guy, and found the guy with his truck, and a great big branch of some rare, exotic, and irreplaceable tree lying next to it.

There was no way to hide the branch, so we did the next best thing.  Tossed it in the nose of the trailer and packed furniture over it as fast as we could.  Who knows, maybe it went back to the foreign country it came from in the first place.

Then there was this other arboretum campus, which will also remain nameless.  We did a project there that was a combination of trailers for usable furniture and rolloff containers for scrap metal.  I did not know this before hand, but there is a thing around fancy trees called a drip line.  If the sun was directly over the tree, the drip line is the tree’s shadow.  Or put another way, if rain falls within the drip line, it has to hit the tree before it hits the ground, because there is a leaf in the way.

Now the deal with this campus was that you could not park a vehicle or even drive a vehicle inside the drip line of any tree, lest you compact the soil, decrease its permeability, and interfere with the tree’s hydration.  Which is a fine thing for the trees, I guess, but is not such a fine thing if you are trying to get tractor trailers and rolloff containers close to a bunch of buildings, and the buildings are surrounded by trees, and you have three days to remove 1,500 pieces of furniture from dormitories that do not have elevators.

Personally, I was sort of the supervisor so it did not affect me directly.  But the kids on the crew, who had to push this furniture in some cases 150 feet instead of 25, they suggested that a few minutes with a chain saw could make the drip lines much, much easier to deal with.

By the way, If you are not from the northeast, here is what happened to the elm trees.  Elm trees are actually sort of a weed that normally grows in and around swamps.  But planted by themselves they grow very large with a very aesthetic sort of upside down vase shape, and so New Englanders planted them everywhere.  Every college campus in New England was covered with elm trees.  Then a fungus or a parasite, I forget which, came over from Holland on a boat and caused something caused Dutch Elm Disease, which killed all the elm trees.  So for a time in the 60s and 70s nearly every college campus in New England looked pretty much like a prison.  Most of the trees they planted as replacements were sugar maples, and now the sugar maples are stressed by climate change and they may go away, too.

IRN has a simple mission:  Keep usable furniture and equipment out of the landfill, by matching surplus furnishings from organizations that no longer need them, with communities that need them desperately.

Click here for a PDF summary of IRN’s Surplus Reuse Program in 2014

Nationwide Capabilities

We work nationwide.  In 2014 we completed 207 projects for nearly 150 different organizations in 24 states from Maine to California.

This brings to nearly 2,000 the total number of projects we have completed since we established the Surplus Reuse Program in 2002.  No other organization has remotely comparable experience.

Worldwide Impact

In 2014 IRN worked with 29 different charitable organizations active on five continents and the Caribbean.

Furniture and equipment  was provided to 85 separate relief and development projects, including 51 locations in 20 states in the U.S., plus 34 locations in 23 countries worldwide.

If you can imagine someone using it again, we’ll find someone to use it . . .

IRN is able to find a home for any and all kinds of furniture and equipment:

Residential furniture.  Classrooms. Laboratories.  Kitchens.  Dining rooms.   Auditoriums.  Doctors’ offices.  Patient rooms.  Office furniture.  Reception furnishings.

We handle projects as small as a few dozen desks and chairs, as large as three dozen tractor-trailers packed floor-to-ceiling.

Comprehensive, Turnkey, Expert at What We Do

IRN is comprehensive and turnkey.  When you turn a project over to IRN, we take responsibility for 100% of your inventory of surplus.  If you want to recover value by liquidating high-quality assets, we can do that.  If there are metal pieces like file cabinets or shelving be recycled for their commodity value, we will do that to.  Our goal is to help you optimize your financial, social, and environmental returns as you define them.  We are very good at what we do.

A 2014 Sampler

Citigroup, San Francisco.  Inventory:  494 chairs filling two tractor-trailers and one box van. Destination:  Democratic Republic of the Congo; Low income assistance, Fresno CA.

Greenfield High School, MA.  Inventory:  1,130 pieces including classroom, science lab, library, administrative furnishings filling seven tractor trailers.  Destination:  Zambia (southern Africa).

The Art Institute of Philadelphia.  Inventory:  560 dormitory room sets plus additional living, dining, & administrative furnishings filling 24 tractor-trailers.  Destination:  Nicaragua, Jamaica.