Category: Recycling

Over three weeks starting May 30, IRN completed reuse projects with three elementary, one middle, and two high schools in Las Cruces and Santa Fe, NM.  Under an ongoing asset management and replacement program, the districts regularly survey and grade the condition of their furnishings.  After accounting for pieces damaged or worn beyond further use, in early 2017 the two districts identified some 11,000 items suitable for reuse, but due for replacement or otherwise no longer needed in their schools.  In addition to items still in place in the schools, the Santa Fe school district used this opportunity to eliminate items sitting in a warehouse, accumulating dust and storage charges, but unlikely ever to be used again.

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The major issue with this group of projects was the tight schedule combined with the large number of pieces that had to be moved, packed, and shipped.  Between May 30 and June 17, IRN coordinated the arrival and dispatch of 45 tractor trailers from seven project sites.  There was far more inventory than any one of our charitable partners could absorb, so IRN partnered with four different charities.  The charities, in turn, distributed the furnishings to fifteen separate locations, including independent schools in South Carolina, California, Florida, New Jersey, Texas, and Ontario (Canada), and international development projects in Mexico, Nicaragua, Guyana, Pakistan, Jordan, Lebanon, Mali, Kenya, Zambia, and Somalia.  The nearly 7,000 items that were shipped to U.S., Mexico, and Canada destinations traveled in fourteen 53-foot tractor trailers.  The 4,000-plus items destined for other international destinations traveled in 31 overseas shipping containers.

Easy?  No, this wasn’t an easy project.  It took dozens of hours of coordination, near-constant communication with charities, international freight forwarders, and trucking companies, organization of multiple moving crews – on some days, three different moving crews working simultaneously at three different schools.  And plenty of troubleshooting on the fly – when a truck broke down, or a charity requested a last-minute change in destination.

Worth it?  Heck, yes.  Nearly 2,000 desks, over 1,000 classroom tables, nearly 1,300 bookshelves and storage cabinets, nearly 5,300 student chairs, and some 2,000 other items including teachers desks, lounge and reception area furniture, music stands, cafeteria tables and chairs, and much more.  All taken away from American landfills, all now being put to use, helping kids and communities where buying new school furniture isn’t an option.  Worth it?  Heck, yes.

Please get in touch if you’d like further information about working with IRN, or look us up on our website, www.irnsurplus.com.

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Many of you won’t know Karl.  Karl Thulin, that is, pronounced Too-Leen.  Karl is an anchor of IRN’s back office.  From his desk in Concord, Karl is the man who interfaces with our charitable partners and handles their, and our, trucks and truckers.

Sometimes, like between Christmas and New Year’s, it’s a pretty easy job.  Other times, like right now, it isn’t.

Here’s what Karl and IRN have been up to, the past couple of weeks:

 

Monday, May 15:  Five projects, in Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont.  Seven trailers and shipping containers to be moved, using five different trucking companies working for three different charities.  Two tractor-trailers going to a recipient in Indiana, one transferring mattresses from one IRN project site to another, and one empty trailer dropped at a project site in Vermont, to be loaded during the week.  Plus three overseas shipping containers bound for Guyana (South America), Mongolia, and Armenia.

Tuesday, May 16:  Three projects, one continuing in New Hampshire, two starting up, in Minnesota and New Jersey.  Six shipments to three charities, using three different truckers.  Three

more trailers heading for Mongolia, two more for Guyana, and one traveling from Minnesota to New York.

Wednesday, May 17:  Four projects, four states, eight trailers loaded.  One shipment from Vermont, staying in Vermont.  Two more from Minnesota to New York.  Two from New Jersey to Guyana.  Three from New Hampshire to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Somalia (East Africa).

Thursday and Friday, May 18 and 19.  Two projects and two shipments each day, one more to Guyana, one more staying in Vermont, and two heading from New Jersey to Kentucky.  A couple of quiet days.

Which Karl needed, to get ready for:

Monday, May 22.  One project carried over, and three new projects fired up, in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont.  Seven trailers loaded, two each for Guatemala, Jamaica, and Honduras, and one for El Salvador.

Tuesday, May 23.  Four projects continued, in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont.  New projects started in Delaware and Ohio.  Karl handled twelve shipments using three different truckers working for four charities.  One shipment traveled from Ohio to Indiana, another from Delaware to Kentucky, three from New York to Guatemala, and five from New Jersey to Honduras (3), El Salvador (2), Jamaica (1), and Nicaragua (1).

Wednesday, May 24.  Ohio sent a second shipment to Indiana.  Three big projects continued in New Jersey and New York, shipping three trailers to Guatemala, three to Honduras, and one to Nicaragua.

Thursday, May 25.  The same three continued in New York and New Jersey, although from new buildings and load-out points.  One trailer was shipped to Haiti, three to Guatemala, and four to two different destinations in Honduras.

Friday, May 26.  Two projects, both in New Jersey; two charities; three shipments; two destinations in Haiti and Kentucky.  One of our big charities shut down in advance of the holiday weekend, moving no trailers, so Karl got a breather.

Which he’ll need, because this week a whole new set of projects fired up.  Eight of them, from Massachusetts to New Mexico and points in between.  Another 25+ trailers, in a four-day week, and we’re short a project manager.

Karl is not an unsung hero.  We sing his praises every day – in between asking him to do too much, right now this instant, with trucks that break down, drivers who get lost, dispatchers who lose track of trucks and drivers, cell phones that conk out, faulty GPS maps, and not enough coffee in the world.

IRN’s mission is simple:  Keep usable furniture out of the landfill, by matching it with nonprofits serving underprivileged and disaster-stricken communities.  Please use this form to get in touch if you’d like more information.

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Situation

Renovating its main campus library, Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT) had nearly 600 pieces of library furniture to dispose of.  There were no ready buyers.  And WIT needed the library cleaned out quickly and efficiently to meet its construction schedule.  So an as-is-where-is tag sale or piecemeal donation to community organizations wasn’t an option, either.  But with a strong commitment to sustainability, WIT wanted a better outcome than throwing good furniture into the dumpster.

Wentworth’s Construction Manager, STV (formerly Diversified Project Management), asked campus mover ABC Moving if they could offer a better solution.  ABC is a longstanding IRN business partner, and picked up the phone.

Planning and Implementation

IRN quickly identified a recipient for WIT’s furniture:  Food For The Poor, another longtime IRN partner.  FFP accepted the furniture for delivery to its central warehouse in Jamaica, for distribution to FFP relief and development projects there and elsewhere in the Caribbean Basin.

The biggest challenge on the project was Wentworth’s urban campus.  IRN overseas shipments are loaded directly into shipping containers, sealed, and then transported directly by truck and ship to their final destination, where they are unlocked and distributed.  But there was no room on Wentworth’s campus to park a 65-foot long tractor-trailer.

IRN and ABC’s solution was to shuttle the furnishings in ABC box trucks to ABC’s warehouse, five miles from Wentworth’s campus.  There the furnishings were off-loaded and cross-docked into IRN shipping containers.  The furnishings were removed from the Wentworth library one day, and packed and shipped in three overseas containers the next, so there was minimal tie-up of ABC’s warehouse space.

Composition

Cost

At regional landfill rates, Wentworth would have paid about $8,500 to dispose of these furnishings as trash.  The cost of reuse through IRN was more than 30% less.  There was added cost to shuttle the furniture to ABC’s warehouse, but this was offset by savings in efficiency, because ABC’s movers could work at their own pace, without delays caused by the need to wait for delivery and switch out a dozen or more rolloff containers.

The Triple Bottom Line of Reuse

Reuse Saves Money.  Wentworth’s savings are typical.  Savings vary in different parts of the country, depending on regional disposal costs.  But one thing is true nationwide:  reuse through IRN will cost less than throwing surplus furniture away.

Reuse Benefits Society.  Wentworth’s furnishings are now helping desperately needy children along the single most promising path to escape a life of poverty:  a solid education.

Reuse Benefits the Environment.  In this single two-day project, Wentworth diverted 30,000 pounds of bulky material from disposal.  In 2016 IRN projects kept more than 7.5 million pounds out of U.S. landfills.

And there’s a fourth.  Repurposing U.S. castoffs to benefit our common global community — reuse is just a great story.

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For more information about IRN, how we work, and the Triple Bottom Line benefits of reuse, send us your contact information below and we’ll get in touch.  You’ll find we’re not salespeople;  we just love what we do.

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One of IRN’s most productive and satisfying relationships is with Habitat for Humanity chapters and ReStores.

When we started handling surplus furnishings, most of our shipments went to charities working overseas.  There was nothing wrong with that, but we knew there is huge need right here in the U.S. for low-cost good-quality furnishings.  We set a goal to keep 50% of the surplus we manage here in the States.

In 2016 we achieved that goal.  Out of the 7.4 million pounds we handled, 3.9 million pounds or 53% were distributed to U.S. recipients.

Our U.S. partners have included charter and tribal schools, regional furniture banks, Goodwill, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and many others.  But Habitat for Humanity’s nationwide network stands out.  In 2016 nearly half of the surplus we distributed in the U.S. went to Habitat.

As you know, Habitat for Humanity builds houses.  Their mission is to provide homes at reasonable cost to deserving families who would otherwise have difficulty getting into the housing market.  Habitat is comprised of several hundred individual affiliates.  Each affiliate is responsible for coordinating all aspects of home-building in its local area.  That includes raising the money to build the homes.

ReStores are one of Habitat’s major fundraisers.  ReStores sell lightly used building materials and furnishings to their local communities.  So doing, they raise money to build Habitat homes, at the same time they are a source of low-cost furnishings to individuals and families who might not be able to afford the cost of buying new.  (If you haven’t checked out your nearest ReStore, you should.  You can find it at http://www.habitat.org/volunteer/near-you/find-your-local-habitat.)

Each ReStore stands on its own.  Some are small storefronts that sell a few dozen or hundreds of items.  Others manage large warehouses and sell thousands of items every month.  Each is responsible for gathering donations of furnishings that they can sell to support local Habitat programs.  With few exceptions, ReStores rely on large numbers of small individual donations to stock their shelves.  They aren’t set up or staffed to be movers or project managers, or to handle generators like colleges or corporations that have periodic large surges of surplus furniture.

That’s where IRN fits in.  For many local ReStores and their managers, IRN is a Santa Claus.  We can deliver in one afternoon quantities of good-quality furniture that they might need months to collect on their own.  Working with IRN, finding furniture is simpler, they have more to sell, and they know IRN stands behind the quality of what we provide.  Additionally, since we generally give them a lot of lead time in advance of a shipment, they are able to get out with publicity to let their communities know what to expect, generating more sales, more rapid turnover, and more income.

Take a look at these examples, from Fresno County, CA, and Mason County, WA, where ReStore managers Torin Blount and Marty Crow have turned their relationship with IRN into a major new source of sales and income.

We sent our first shipments – 1,200 pieces – to a Habitat ReStore in Connecticut in December 2013.  That number grew to 8,200 pieces in 2014, to 11,100 in 2015, and to more than 19,400 pieces in 2016.  That’s more than 100 tractor trailers filled with furniture.  We’ve contributed to 89 different Habitat affiliates and ReStores in 27 states (plus two Canadian provinces).  A few of these IRN partners have taken dozens of tractor-trailers filled with furniture.  Some have taken a few box trucks.  In all cases, they’ve gotten furniture they can sell, and they’ve been able to put more money in the bank to build more Habitat for Humanity homes.

And helped IRN achieve our goal of helping more people and communities right here in the U.S.

What a hoot, for all involved.  Furniture stays out of the landfill.  Local Habitats benefit.  Their communities benefit.  The original owners of the furniture save money, and know they’ve done the right thing.  I’m pretty sure I can speak for everyone at IRN:  This has to be one of the best jobs in the world.

 

If you’re a nonprofit that can use good-quality, gently used furniture to support your mission, or if you’re an organization that has surplus furniture in need of a new home, please let us know.  We’re a matchmaker.

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