MedShare International

Every year, Americans throw away millions of items that would be welcomed in poorer countries, and a wide range of groups make it their mission to recycle them. Some of these campaigns are decades old and well known, others are more spontaneous, and still others fill special niches. Here are three organizations that illustrate these possibilities.

The Lions Club

Ever since Helen Keller challenged members of the Lions Clubs in 1925 to become "knights of the blind in this crusade against darkness," they have donated much of their volunteer resources to vision services.

The best-known part of this effort is the recycling of eyeglasses, which are collected in more than 13,000 collection boxes and sent to seven recycling centers in the United States. There, members clean the glasses, determine the prescription using a machine known as a lensometer and categorize each pair by prescription. Since 1994, Lions Clubs have distributed more than 20 million pairs of glasses in countries like Angola, Brazil, Cambodia, Gambia, Ghana, Mexico, Romania, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Tajikistan.

Pedals for Progress

In the mid-1970's, David Schweidenback was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador. he noticed that his neighbor, a carpenter, was one of the most well-off men in his town. His bicycle allowed him to do more than anyone else: he could carry more tools and get to more places faster. When Mr. Schweidenback returned to the United States, he knew he wanted to send bikes to Ecuador.

In 1991, he decided to try collecting some bicycles. His goal was to get 12 bikes; he got almost 150. He soon realized that he could put his plan into effect on a much larger scale, and Pedals for Progress was born.

Mr. Schweidenback did not simply want to send bikes. He thought that the bikes could be a tool to help change the lives of the people in the community that received them.

Pedals for Progress collects bikes by working with about 150 civic organizations, like the Eagle Scouts, the Girl Scouts and Rotary Clubs, to sponsor collection drives in their communities.

The bikes are checked to make sure they are in fairly good working order before they are shipped.

Pedals for Progress then coordinates with a nonprofit group working in an area of a developing country in need of transportation alternatives. It helps the group receive the bikes and open a rudimentary bicycle shop. This shop then hires local people and trains them to repair the bicycles. The bikes are sold at a very low cost to local residents.

The hope is that in the majority of cases, the proceeds from the nonprofit agency's bike shop will pay for more shipments of donated bikes, spurring a continuing process.

Goodwill Industries in Panama City, for example, has just received its 12th shipment of bicycles since 2000.

MedShare International

Every year, billions of dollars' worth of usable medical equipment is thrown out. Because of the United States' stringent regulations for medical equipment, a large portion of what is thrown away is unused.

After learning this statistic six years ago, A. B. Short and Robert Freeman decided to start a nonprofit group that could somehow take that waste and make it useful to people in other countries. The two men had been partners 10 years earlier when they founded Cafe 458, an innovative soup kitchen in Atlanta that is run like a restaurant.

MedShare International now works in partnership with 15 local Georgia hospitals, where collection barrels for recyclable items have been set up. The equipment MedShare collects runs the gamut from sutures and sterile gloves to stethoscopes, hospital beds and infant incubators.

MedShare has worked with hospitals in more than 80 countries, shipping to places like Armenia, Cameroon, China, Haiti, Liberia and Peru. The hospitals order items they want form an online catalog. This helps the program stick to one of the most important pieces of advice the founders got when they were doing their initial research: never donate anything overseas that hasn't been asked for.

"So often, things are donated where it's like, 'I've got this, here it is, take it,'" says Mr. Short. "But it's the fact that the power of choosing is in the hands of the recipient instead of in the hands of the giver that makes it a quality donation."