You might be a top-notch recycler, but I’m willing to bet that you’ve never tried to recycle a book. Maybe you’re like me: my reluctance to part with books, even those I despised upon first reading, is strong enough to land me on one of those hoarding television shows. But it’s more likely that you know—or at least have a sneaking suspicion—that you can’t simply toss a few old paperbacks in with your flattened cardboard. Most paper recyclers can’t process the glue that binds books along the spine. Some people donate them, of course, or try to resell them, but so many books wind up in boxes on the curb, and eventually, in landfills. For the really out-of-date or the damaged-beyond-readability, specialized companies like the somewhat aggressively-named Book Destruction will pulp entire books, spine and all, and send the results directly back to the paper mills. But for books with a little shelf life left in them, there may be another solution.
Thrift Recycling Management has been collecting and re-purposing landfill-bound books for years. They scan ISBNs or enter titles into a database, and their computers use an algorithm to determine if the volume is fit to be resold, donated to charity, or consigned to the recycling plant. TRM, which is based in Washington state and is expanding across the country, has just been granted $8.5 million by venture capitalists. That’s great news, because every region deserves a service like this one. There are a million ways to reuse books, of course, but sometimes a cheap paperback (I’m thinking deeply yellowed pages and a spine permanently curled open) might be better off pulped and turned into a brand-new cheap paperback. Well, I suppose it’s a more dignified fate for a book than being turned into a Kindle case, anyway.
(Warehouse Dump, by parkydoodles.)
