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School Book Recycling

Looking to buy or sell old school books?
Look no further than www.schoolbookexchange.ie before you dump old books or buy first hand. 

Book exchange –new money saving environmental initiative

In Ireland, up to one million college, secondary, and primary text books become obsolete or out of date each year and a sizable proportion of these end up in landfills. This is a staggering environmental waste. Up until now, no options existed to help reduce this financial and environmental burden.

However thanks to the innovation of Mr. Tim Hurley from Waterford, now there is a solution for parents and college students. Tim has set up a dedicated website to solve this issue. www.schoolbookexchange.ie is a new website for anybody looking to buy, sell or exchange educational books (primary, secondary, third-level). If you have books, which are of no use to you, they may very well be on a book list in another part of the country. If you are looking for a book, you will be pleased to find that textbooks are generally sold at a fraction of the cost.

"Necessity is the mother of invention" and the idea for an online text book exchange facility arose from Tim's bitter experience of paying out hundreds of euros year after year to buy new school books” says Tim.

“I was convinced that there simply had to be a better way of supplying students with the books they need. My own investigations show that there are many hundreds of households with old school books stored in attics and lofts all over the country. At the same time there are students and parents all over Ireland looking for these same books. To Tim, the solution seemed obvious, a mechanism where people with old books could make contact with those that have these books prescribed on a current book list. And so the idea for the website was born”.

The website is now up and running and Tim is urging people all over Ireland to use it. "The immediate need is to encourage parents and students to register their used college and school books before the summer holidays. This will make a huge amount of books available on the website for people to buy when the next book list comes out. It is free to register all books and to browse for titles. It costs €1.00 to purchase a book on the site. (This is the only charge associated with the website). The cost of books is a separate transaction decided by the seller (the price will be listed on the site along with the condition of the book etc).

Tim is encouraging all parents not to buy a new textbook, before checking out www.schoolbookexchange.ie first to see if you can buy it second hand. Thousands of people have already used the website and registered their used books, and I know there are many more people out there who will do the same once they know about this service exists.
 
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