Books, like all things, have a lifespan, a day will come when they no longer can do the job they were meant to do. This is seen in its most extreme in the textbook market, where a student would buy and use a book for a few months, sell it back to a store, and the cycle would repeat until the information was out of date or it was in too poor of a condition to be resold. Many of these books end up in the trash—even if put in the recycling bin—as the binding can prevent the book from being recycled.
Enter Mark Beauchamp. A palette of old, unwanted books at the dump stood out to him. There had to be something he could do to save them from rotting in a landfill, he thought. He and his wife Kiki entered the world of book repair to get a few more uses out of broken, busted-up books and created Bulrushed Books.
“We try to find a home for every book,” Kiki said, “even if it’s for students as notebooks.” When books are too damaged or their text too out of date, Bulrushed breaks them down to be recycled into new paper. The old books along with pulp from sawmills, newspapers, and magazines become paper that Bulrushed turns into notebooks they sell on their own site.
Not only do they sell their repaired books on the Alibris Marketplace, they repair books that make their way to our warehouse. “Getting pallets from Alibris is a fun surprise, we never know what treasures we’ll find in them!” said Kiki.
With the growing social awareness of what we do with our waste and what happens to the things we put in the recycling bin, Bulrushed has seen great success over the years. They’re aiming to add more partnerships to create a zero-waste life cycle for books.
Digital storyteller, Google Analytics tinkerer, bird fact dispenser.
