A Book Donation Project with Humble Expectations: Creating a Better World

Three community organizations—and children all over the world in need—can now benefit from your extra books. 

Friday was the kick-off for the Better World Books bin in the City of Norcross, with a portion of proceeds going to three community organizations: The Norcross Cluster Schools Partnership, Sustainable Norcross and the Norcross Arts Alliance. The new green bin is located in the Norcross Police Department parking lot.

So far, the company has 350 book bins in place in Atlanta, including some at Gwinnett Public Libraries. Their goal is 800 bins in the metro area, according to Steve Ward, Business Development Manager for Better World Books.

Representatives from all three organizations, as well as Ward and Mary Beth Bender from the city Public Works Department, were on hand for the first ceremonial drops by Daphne Adebayo, a student who volunteered in the City of Norcross last week. (Look for her blog post about her experience on Norcross Patch soon.)

Sustainable Norcross will likely use the funds to help support its Safe Routes to School program; NCSP will use the proceeds for on-going literacy effort; the Arts Alliance hopes to support an elementary school arts competition. 

Also, every time you drop a book in the green bin, Better World Books donates a book to a child in need through Books for Africa and Feed the Children. It has donated 3.3 million books through its partner organizations so far, according to materials on the company website.

If that “one for one” model sounds familiar, it is because it’s a similar model to the incredibly successful company Toms Shoes, which donates one pair of shoes for every new pair bought.

Despite all of the focus on doing good, the company itself is a for-profit enterprise that sells textbooks and used books online. It touts yet another benefit of being a “connector” of people with used books: millions of pounds of paper kept out of landfills.

For a typical drop box like the one found in the Norcross PD parking lot, 11,000 pounds of books are collected and kept out of a landfill per year, according to Ward. By his calculations, that saves 27,000 kilowatts of electricity and 58,000 gallons of water by association.