Jun 25, 2008 - Claremont, Calif. - Residential life furnishings that were removed May 27 and 28 for the renovation of Mildred Mudd (East) Dorm will be re-deployed and used by charities in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A total of 605 pieces of surplus furniture—38,072 pounds—were removed from East and loaded directly onto ocean containers bound for their destination. Shaffer addressed concerns for the environmental costs of shipping around the globe: “I have been working with the IRN on ways to calculate and reduce the impact of transportation emissions of the surplus equipment to the different places around the globe. The IRN is sensitive to this and is currently working on a carbon footprint model for its distribution process.” HMC worked with IRN in donating 23 tons of furniture to Jamaica and Nicaragua in 2007 and 21 tons of furniture to impoverished areas of El Salvador in 2006. The college’s association with IRN began in 2005 when the company hauled away two tractor-trailers filled with furniture from Linde Dormitory and delivered them to Gulf Coast homes and businesses devastated by the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
“We were one of the first institutions on the west coast to dispose of the surplus furniture through the IRN,” said HMC Plant Engineer Tom Shaffer (pictured in photo, bottom right). “The program has expanded to Claremont McKenna College, the Claremont University Center (CUC), as well as other colleges and universities on the west coast. Currently the CUC has two containers permanently parked for collection of surplus furnishing and equipment for clean outs during the year from the colleges. This year alone, HMC has avoided more than 19 tons of landfill waste and reduced the cost of disposal, as well as aided those in need in third-world countries like Haiti.”
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