Charitable Reuse
founded as a recycling cooperative
for education and healthcare institu-
tions. IRN’s role was to take over their
members’ loading docks and find a
home for all their recyclables: paper
and cardboard, cans and bottles, scrap
metal, plastics, computers, fluorescent
lamps . . . . .
And then furniture. Boston College
was the first to call, with all that dorm
furniture in the parking lot. IRN’s COO
Dana Draper recalls: “We looked at it
and said, ‘This is good stuff. Why aren’t
you giving it to a halfway house or a
homeless shelter, someone who can use
it?’ Our friends at BC replied, ‘We’re
in Boston. Inside ten miles there are
40,000 dorm rooms and three dozen
schools. We all have this stuff to get rid
of, and we’ve filled up every shelter and
halfway house and thrift store in three
states. We just need the furniture to go
away and not thrown out.”
26 essentials | summer 2017
So IRN Recycled It
But they knew there had to be a
better solution, and started making
calls. Not to local charities, but to
national and international organiza-
tions that provide relief and devel-
opment aid on a large scale. Perhaps
they would be able to use good quality
furniture in the quantities that were
available from IRN’s members —
hundreds or sometimes thousands of
pieces at a time.
“We discovered a market failure. In
fact there was a huge need among re-
lief organizations for usable furniture
— to rebuild after floods and earth-
quakes, to give families a better home
than a tin shanty, to give kids the
chance to study at a real desk. There
was more need for furniture than we
could ever hope to supply. But there
was no one making the match.”
Among the generators — the
schools that IRN worked with — no
one had the time and resources to
network with dozens of charities who
might be able to use their surplus fur-
niture. Among the potential recipients
no one had the time and resources to
network with the thousands of schools
that might have usable furniture to
offer. Neither side had the capability
or resources to manage the projects to
make the transfer happen — setting
up logistics (moving crews, transporta-
tion, packing trucks, filling out paper-
work, and freight tracking).
Meanwhile good furniture kept
going into dumpsters, while kids
kept doing their schoolwork on wood
planks.
So IRN kept making calls, and
started making matches, and began
moving surplus furniture to charities.
In 2002 IRN shipped two trailers of