Community Cycles in Boulder partnered with our local hard-to-recycle-materials public utility/non-profit, (called CHARM: Center for HArd to Recycle Materials) which is the place people can take old paint, tv sets, mattresses, tires, etc. The center finds markets for this stuff, resells it, and keeps the stuff out of landfills as part of their mission.

They now accept bicycles at their location, and allow us to come and pick through for stuff we want, and leave the stuff we don't, for them to sell as scrap metal. They get a rate for a specific purity of steel. A bicycle, complete with rubber tires and tubes, plastic shifters, reflectors, housing, etc, meets the percentage for steel that they get paid, so they don't have to strip the parts off to get money for them. The bikes get chipped up and sorted by material as little tiny pieces.
 What this means for us us that it's a few crappy dept store bikes that we don't have to deal with, and the only ones we have to transport away from there are the good ones we want.

We also struck another deal with CHARM; we built up some bikes and gave them to the center, and now we get free tire drop off. The old rate was 50 cents a tire, I believe.

 We still accept trash bikes at our shop, but we put them straight into our dumpster, and call our local junk guy when it's full. Some of the dumpier bikes go straight in with zero strippage happening first, depending on staff power, time, space, etc.





On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Urban Bike Project Wilmington, DE <urbanbikeproject@gmail.com> wrote:
hey folks,

a moral or social dilemma: when your shop accepts donations of used bikes, but you're already filled to the gills with hundreds of bikes that may or may not ever get fixed up, how do you begin to turn away donations that are really not worth the space?  or do you?  just looking for some suggestions of how other shops have dealt with this issue.  it gets to the point where we don't have the time, space, or man-power to strip down all those         pieces-of-crap even to send to the scrap yard, but now that people know that we accept used bikes, it's hard to know how to say no.

thanks!

sarah


Urban Bike Project of Wilmington
-a 501(c)3 non-profit bike shop-
1908 N. Market Street (entrance is in the parking lot behind the building)
Wilmington, DE 19802

Hours:
Thursday 6:30-9:00
Saturday 1:00-4:00

Visit us online at http://urbanbikeproject.org

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