Category: Recycling

We don’t always get photos or feedback when IRN surplus is distributed in Jamaica or Haiti or Ghana or a small town in Kentucky.  In most of these places there are no smartphones.  Outside of cities like Kingston or Port au Prince, there’s no cell service.   Almost no one has a digital camera.  People are busy just trying to get by from day to day.  Taking photographs of furniture being unloaded, of homes that have real beds for the first time, or classrooms newly furnished with desks – that’s not a high priority.

So it’s nice, especially at this time of year, when we do get to see a photo of a smiling boy in Jamaica, with an old piano from Massachusetts.  It’s a reminder how incredibly fortunate we are, that we can get rid of a good piano, because we think it’s no longer good enough.  It’s a reminder that things we don’t value, things we call waste, can make an incalculable difference in the lives of less fortunate neighbors.  It’s a reminder how little it can take to do a whole lot of good.

And at Christmas, when a thousand pressures tell us to spend, and consume, and eat and drink and party and spend and consume some more, it’s a reminder what the Christmas story is about.  It’s about giving.  Not because you want to show off or you expect something in return.  Because it puts a huge smile on your son or your daughter or your Mom or your Dad, or on some poor kid in Jamaica.  Because it makes their lives a little better.  Because it makes the world a little better place.

To all who have worked with IRN, in 2013 and ever since we started the Surplus Program in 2002, we would like to say “Thank You.”  We thank you for your care and concern, for making a difference in the lives of people and communities far, far away.  For giving without expecting anything in return, not even a photograph.  But knowing, somewhere out there, there’s a kid with a big huge smile, because you made a difference in his life.

(The smiling boy, and the piano, are at St. George’s College, a K-12 school in Kingston, Jamaica.  The piano is one of more than 1,200 items that were provided to St. Georges in 2013 by the Berlin-Boylston School District in Massachusetts.  Click here for a Special Followup Report with more photos of the surplus being loaded in Massachusetts, and then unloaded and in use in Jamaica.)

A Massachusetts firm asked IRN to clean out a retired manufacturing facility. Dating from the 1930s, the plant had been used for production, storage, and administration. Production was shut down and employees moved out in the 1990s.  The plant was used for storage for a few years, but eventually this use was dropped, too, and the plant was essentially abandoned. Left behind were a wide range of materials, including: production equipment; wood crates and pallets; off-spec plastics (raw and cured); appliances; computers, monitors and other electronics; lab equipment, office furniture, racking, and other surplus; cardboard and other paper (including confidential documents); parts, piping, valves, HVAC equipment, and miscellaneous debris.

There were many challenges:

• Small spaces, immovable masonry walls, restrictive passageways and access points;
• Complex production equipment including large pieces of equipment erected in place, piping and valves;
• Hundreds of boxes and file cabinets containing confidential corporate and personal information;
• Complex set of materials with very different deconstruction, handling, and disposition requirements.
• Materials mixed and jumbled throughout the facility.

Click here for a printable PDF case study about this project.

Planning and Implementation

IRN organized the cleanout in three phases:

Phase 1 addressed the major pieces of processing and storage equipment. These demanded specialized crews and lifting and cutting equipment. Our goal was to isolate this phase to provide a safe and orderly working environment.

Phase 2 attacked the diverse array of furnishings and supplies left over from production and administrative uses, including furniture and built-ins, boxed and filed records, computers, pallets and crates.

Phase 3 took care of “the rest” – focusing especially on recovering value from the tons of ferrous and nonferrous metal in pipes, fixtures, and wiring.

Results: 127 Tons Reused and Recycled (Table)

At the end of the project, zero was landfilled. About 60% of the total recovered was metal, and another 25% was paper and cardboard. All was recycled. IRN placed nearly twenty thousand pounds of excess furniture for reuse by charitable organizations. Old electronic equipment and Universal Wastes were recycled in accordance with state and federal regulations; none were disposed. The ten percent of all materials that could not be segregated for reuse or source-separated recycling were recycled as mixed debris.

Costs: 38% Savings Compared to Disposal (Table)

Before bringing IRN into the project, the firm had solicited prices to dispose of the “wastes” from the decommissioned facility, allowing a direct comparison with the cost of reuse and recycling. Managing for reuse+recycling added about $2,250 to labor and transportation costs, but yielded savings of more than $18,000 in the cost of material disposition. Across the entire project, reuse+ recycling yielded savings of more than $14,000, or 38% of the proposed cost to manage the project for waste disposition.

Keys to Success

Planning and Coordination.  There were many barriers working in an old mill building.  Careful planning and onsite coordination were required to optimize use of labor, tools, and transportation, in order to deal efficiently with the wide range of materials, limitations on access, plus the fact that many items needed to be uninstalled or disassembled.

Management and Staff Commitment. Knowing that the project was a priority for company management, local staff jumped into the effort providing resources like extra forklifts, snow removal, and traffic control that were essential to making the project safe, efficient, and cost effective.

Communications. Regular updates to management and plant staff were essential to gaining employee support and their cooperation in making the project a success,  particularly including information about the financial and environmental benefits of the project.

Here’s a pretty typical corporate case study, a project we did with One Workplace in Silicon Valley.

The company, a One Workplace client, was moving to a new campus. They took along the best of their furniture. But when they did a cost:benefit analysis, they decided it was more cost effective to buy new than to disassemble, move, and reassemble the majority of their systems and general office furniture.

With a soft economy and so many corporations downsizing or consolidating, there was no market for the used furnishings. The company prides itself on its Sustainability footprint, so they weren’t going to just throw the stuff away. They called One Workplace for help, and One Workplace got in touch with IRN.

From there is was a straightforward project. The buildings we needed to access were already vacant, and the furniture earmarked for internal redeployment had been removed. The remaining inventory was high quality Steelcase product, which we had no trouble placing with our charitable network.

The only real issue was scale: more than 600 office sets, and a total of more than 6,000 pieces, including more than a thousand boxes of office supplies and small office furnishings (lamps, pen and pencil holders, etc.). We scheduled the project over two weeks: Week One primarily for knockdown of the systems furnishings and load-out of the smaller and freestanding items; Week Two for loading and shipment of the office sets.

The furnishings and supplies were provided to three different IRN charitable partners. Feed the Children took four loads for distribution from their southern California depot to community development projects in the U.S. and overseas. Three loads were shipped to the Fundacion Nuevos Horizontes in El Salvador, and three were packed and shipped to Food for the Poor’s central Caribbean depot in Jamaica, which supplies FFTP relief and development initiatives throughout the Caribbean Basin.

At the end of the day, the company paid about 20% less for reuse than they would have spent on disposal, and they had zero disposal. 100% of their surplus is now redeployed and back in service, where it will remain for years to come.

Saving money by doing the right thing; that’s called alignment of incentives.

Click here to see the full case study.

 

It is not widely known that IRN has one greatest invention.  Like, a physical thing, a product, a real invention.  It is the IRN Tech Double, which is a dual recycling container for batteries and handheld electronics.

It is actually Dana’s invention, but I do the writing and he doesn’t know the password to the Blog.  And I do sit in the next office.  So I’ll just take credit for it.

It is actually, for real, our clients’ invention.  BU and Emerson and a couple of other schools came to IRN with an issue:  the growing number of cell phones, GPS’s, IPods, GameBoys, and dozens of other handheld devices that were showing up in their trash.  Most of these had rechargeable batteries, and rechargeable batteries need to be handled as Universal Waste.  They shouldn’t be thrown out.

Most of these schools were already collecting batteries, but they didn’t want handhelds mixed in their battery bins.  At the same time they didn’t want to be setting out yet another bin for another recyclable material.  They wanted a container that locked, because of the personal information stored on so many handhelds.  They wanted something small enough to set out just about anywhere, but big enough to hold a decent volume.  They wanted it to accept essentially all batteries and handhelds.

So Dana (whoops, I mean, it was me) got out a hole saw and one of Busch Systems’ excellent small recycling containers, and created the Tech Double.  He called Busch and asked if they could turn his hand-carved prototype into a production model, and they did.

The Tech Double is a dual recycling bin, one side for batteries, the other for handheld electronics.  The top is slotted to give a clear message what goes where:  one slot round for batteries, the other wide (wide enough for tablets) and narrow for handhelds.  Inside are two separate containers to receive the different materials.  The top locks to prevent tampering or pilfering discarded items, and the bin can be secured so it doesn’t walk away.  And IRN provides clear, distinctive labels, which can be customized with logos or other identifiers.  Overall dimensions are 16¾” x 12” x 13¼” tall, so the bin can be conveniently set out in almost any location.

The Tech Double is, in fact, a really good invention, that addresses a serious issue, and fills a real need.  A couple of dozen schools are using it now, and all are very, very happy with it.

The Tech Double is available exclusively direct from IRN.  Call 866-229-1962 and ask for Joel Bradford, or get on to the IRN website, www.ir-network.com, and click on “Shop” at the top (you’ll discover we also have a great line of regular recycling containers, as well).