R4 Collection Day Turns Trash to Treasure

For three hours Wednesday, a steady stream of visitors to Reston Town Center dropped cast-off hunks of metal on Market Street.

The discards were most welcome.

"We filled two trucks again this time," said Carol A. Nahorniak, a spokesman for the Town Center, and one of the supervisors for yesterday's R4 Collection Day: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. Reston!  "It is always a very successful event."

The trucks were packed with an array of no-longer-wanted electronics, including computers, DVD players, fax machines, cell phones and TVs. Instead of going to a landfill, most of the haul will be recycled and reconstructed. Items that absolutely can't be re-used will be compacted to make their "footprint" a bit smaller.

Electronics were the most popular items dropped off at the event.

"There are literally hundreds of offices here who give what they no longer need," Nahorniak says.

The  R4 event also collected used eyeglasses, bicycles, portable sewing machines, reams of paper that was shredded on site, and winter coats for Reston Interfaith.

This is the fifth R4.  The first event took place in the fall of 2008, and it has continued every fall and spring since then. The next event is scheduled for mid-April 2011.

Keith Oberg said the event will help his group, Bikes for the World, reach a goal of collecting 50,000 bicycles by the end of the year.

Locally, Bikes for the World, founded in 2005,  has local offices in Vienna and warehouses in Tysons Corner and Rockville. But it acts globally, providing bikes to thousands of people, mostly in third-world countries.

The group partners with hundreds of volunteer organizations "to collect the thousands of unused unwanted bicycles sitting in people's basements and garages," Oberg said.

Instead of collecting dust, he said, the bikes then go to "get kids to school and adults to work."